“LaMere—the chief nun on this floor is so strongly sensitive and otherworldly. I send word to her that there are devils in my room so she will come and tell me good-night. It is all so unlike the big white efficiency box of an American Institution.”
She needed a bit of discreet scavenging work from Leonard:
“Could you call a taxidermist and find three old owls for Ursula. And we can tie them up by their legs or find a funny old cage for her to hang them in her office. There’s a taxidermist on the corner of 11th or 12th and Sixth Ave—I think.” Margaret was rarely at a loss for such information. “She wants her owls. And having threatened to give her three owls for Christmas I’ve got to make good.”
Margaret’s doctor brought her good Bordeaux from his own cellar to drink with her meals. By Wednesday, November 12, when she wrote a long letter to her cousin Judy, she was thinking in some detail about her social calendar:
“Here I sit in a Big Blue Room in a sort of Ba Ba [sic] the elephant hospital—As George [a mutual friend] would say We always do end up in a swarm of Nuns. . . . I’ve really enjoyed this odd French hospital.”51 Her appendix, she explained, was presently “sitting in a bottle” in her room. “It nearly exploded. And Pebble is so glad it’s out he’s jumping up and down on his ship between the Bahammas [sic] and the Virgin Islands.” She expected to be discharged soon. After a brief stopover in London, she intended to fly back to New York around November 25 and would see her cousin then. By December 1 she hoped to rejoin her fiancé. “Peb and I are never going to be apart again and I will probably cross the Pacific with him.”
Judy had recently given birth to her first child, a boy. “I came staggering out of Italy,” Margaret reported, “with a huge blue basket of a cradle on my head and some little white rabbit slippers” as gifts for the baby. “How big are Jame’s [sic] feet?” she wanted to know. “What do you call your little man child?” There was a sense of shared triumph in Margaret’s congratulations for her cousin and in her happy report of her own plans. They both had reason to feel proud. “Lots of love and warm hugs to prove we aren’t like the rest of that cold breed of Browns. Your letter came the fourth or third day of my operation and it did me so much good.”
On Thursday, November 13, Margaret was nearly recovered and about to be released for further rest at the Chateâu Barlow. She was in a jaunty mood as she greeted her nurse just before ten o’clock in the morning. Lying in bed, Margaret kicked one leg high over her head, can-can style, as much as to say, “See how well I’m doing!”52 Then suddenly she blacked out. It was later found that an embolism which had formed in her leg had at that instant dislodged and travelled the short distance to her brain. Margaret regained a groggy sort of consciousness a moment later, but only for a moment. Then she was dead.
Word of Margaret’s death spread rapidly from friend to friend over the next twenty-four hours. Charles Shaw, on hearing the news over the phone from Bruce Bliven, Jr., gasped for breath, sounding briefly as if he might be having a heart attack. He spent much of the rest of the day calling other friends and colleagues of hers: Bill Scott, Ursula Nordstrom, Esphyr Slobodkina. When he lay down for his afternoon nap, sleep eluded him. As the day came to an end, he wrote in his diary, “I am more shocked and saddened than I can say. . . . Her absence will be a large gap in my life.”53
Bruce Bliven, Jr., telephoned Garth Williams to tell him what was known about her death. Mustering a tone of mock exasperation that Margaret herself would doubtless have appreciated, Bliven sighed into the phone, “This is the dirtiest trick Margaret ever played on us.”54 As the obituaries appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, the last of the letters she had written to friends arrived from France.
In accordance with her wishes, Margaret’s body was cremated in Marseille on Friday, November 21. In a communiqué dated November 24, the American Consul General stationed in Nice, Quincy F. Roberts, wrote Roberta to confirm the circumstances of her sister’s death and to express his sympathy. Leonard Weisgard, who had previously arranged to meet Margaret at Idlewild Airport on her return to the city, instead retrieved her ashes early on the morning of November 28. As had been provided for in the codicil to her will, he gave these to James Rockefeller, who took the ashes to Maine and scattered them in the waters off Vinalhaven.
As provided for in her will, Rockefeller also took title to the Only House and its surrounding property, but he renounced his claim to her other personal property and effects. Rockefeller proceeded with his planned sail, which lasted three years and eventually took him around the world. On his return, he moved out of his family home in Greenwich, Connecticut and established his residence in a Maine town on Penobscot Bay in close proximity to the Only House. In a grassy clearing on the island property, he erected a simple stone marker as a monument to Margaret.55
Early on in Man and His Island, Rockefeller’s memoir of his round-the-world journey, he recounts a friendly parting with one of his original sailing companions, a young fellow who like himself had fallen in love during the time of their final preparations. When the friend decided to drop out of the crew, he apologized for leaving “Peb” short-handed, to which Rockefeller replied, “Go ahead and grab happiness when you see it. You may never get a second chance.”56
The Hurds were in California at the time of Margaret’s death. When they got back to Vermont they found her last postcard to Posey perched on the mantelpiece where they’d left it. The final words of the message, Margaret’s footloose “Hail and farewell,” now sounded darkly premonitory as, keeping to an old theme, they wondered if Margaret’s untimely death was not in some obscure way the final legacy of Michael Strange’s destructiveness.
In the weeks and months following Margaret’s death, Ursula Nordstrom caught herself repeatedly in the impulse to telephone her favorite author to ask her advice about this or that publishing matter, only to realize with undiminished force that it was no longer possible.
In January of 1951723 Lucy Sprague Mitchell, writing in the first issue of the 69 Bank Street newsletter, eulogized “Brownie” as “an experimenter, a kind of scientist.” She was, Margaret’s former teacher declared, “as experimental as anyone I have ever known.”57
There was a groping, oddly second-hand quality to portions of the piece, for which Mitchell had plainly relied on published sources (the Life article and others) for a number of details. Her own recollections of Margaret’s “experimental” temperament were perhaps too emotionally charged to set down in specific terms. She was struggling there and then, it seems, to resolve her unease over Margaret’s relationship with Michael Strange. In an oblique reference to Michael, she acknowledged that while the Bank Street community had always called Margaret “Brownie” there had also been “some friends” who called her by other names. Poignantly, Mitchell recalled that
for years [Margaret] had told me that she wished to stop writing for children. She wanted to write for grown-ups. And I always had the feeling that some time she would. But not until she herself had fully grown up. In the last few years, which were full of human suffering for her, I felt that time was approaching. . . . Given a few more years of living, of experimenting, where might that gleam of hers have led her?
In the days immediately following her death, her friends had tried to decide what might constitute a suitable memorial to Margaret. A traditional service had been quickly ruled out on the grounds that Margaret surely would not have wanted one. Instead, a party was planned, to be held at Cobble Court on what would have been her forty-third birthday. The gathering took place in the late afternoon of Thursday, May 21—two days early. Present in Margaret’s garden for the bittersweet occasion were Garth Williams, Leonard Weisgard, Bruce Bliven, Jr., Charles Shaw, Judith Stanton, and a dozen others. Shaw, in his diary entry for that day, noted that the champagne served at the “little party in memory of MWB” had been “very good.”58 Margaret’s cousin recalled years later, “We all got drunk. That’s what Margaret would have liked.”59
But Garth Williams’s impression of the event was perhaps the most telling. At Margaret’s many intimate dinner parties and garden gatherings over the years, there had always been an atmosphere of convivial banter and festivity, but with Margaret herself not present to set the tone, her friends appeared to have little to say to each other.60
That spring of 1953, Harper published The Duck, another of Margaret’s collaborations with Ylla. On the dustjacket of the book, in place of the usual author’s biography, there appeared this eulogy, probably written by Ursula Nordstrom:
Margaret Wise Brown’s recent death brought a tragic and untimely end to a brilliant career. She was the author of more than a hundred books for the very young. . . . The wisdom and beauty and tenderness of her writing, which approaches true poetry, finds unending response in the little children for whom she wrote and whose love for her books is a real and lasting tribute to her genius.61
A far less expected tribute was published in the June 1953 issue of the Horn Book magazine, in Anne Carroll Moore’s “Three Owls’ Notebook” column. After reaffirming her admiration for the illustrator Jean Chariot (several of whose books Margaret had written), Moore turned to a consideration of Ylla’s picture books. “I feel very strongly,” she wrote, “about the treatment of animals, as mere properties in books for children. Respect for animals . . . is well served by so beautiful a book as The Duck. . . . Of Margaret Wise Brown’s many stories for little children this is to me one of the best: it is so natural.”62
As a critical appraisal of Margaret’s merry fantasy, which in tone and substance has rather more in common with the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup than with a Roger Tory Peterson field guide, Moore’s praise was notably misdirected. More striking than that, however, was the mere fact that the librarian had written affirmatively about her work at all.
In accordance with the provisions of Margaret’s will, Roberta Rauch and Bruce Bliven, Jr., were appointed coexecutors of her estate. Margaret had not consulted either her sister or her friend about this in advance. The responsibilities which now fell to them entailed a five-year labor of sorting through voluminous stacks of unpublished manuscripts, disposing of a nettlesome challenge to the will initiated by Walter Varney, and seeing into print a substantial number of additional works, some already under contract, many others not.
Varney’s challenge concerned the disposition of the rights to Margaret’s Doubleday books, which she had rather mischievously tied to the custody of Crispian. The August 28 will provided that if Margaret’s sister was prepared to take custody of her difficult dog she could also have the Doubleday income. The October 30 codicil, however, offered Varney the dog (“if he wants him”) without making reference to the book royalties previously linked to Crispian. Varney, who at the time of Margaret’s death already had Crispian in his care, decided to press his claim. The matter was not laid to rest for five more years, when it was finally decided that Varney was welcome to keep Margaret’s Kerry Blue and Roberta was entitled to the income.
It had widely been assumed by Margaret’s friends, and by publishing associates who knew of her frequent travels, assorted homes, and extravagant gift-giving, that she was the lifelong beneficiary of a sizeable inheritance. This was not so. Her only inherited wealth consisted of a modest amount of stock left to her by one of the Brown aunts. Her father had continued to give her an annual allowance at least through 1946 (and possibly afterward), but this sum, whatever it was, appears not to have been large. Far and away the lion’s share of her annual income, which during the last years of her life averaged around $15,000 (or about $80,000 in 1990 dollars), derived from her earnings as a writer.63
Margaret had never been very careful about financial recordkeeping and bill-paying. (She once told a friend that she often remembered to pay her bills while strapped into her seat on an airport runway during the moments before take-off.) At the time of her death, her bank account was at a low ebb: there was no money whatsoever with which to pay her miscellaneous creditors, the lawyers’ fees, and the bequests to her heirs.
Margaret had always viewed will making as an opportunity to repay past kindnesses and to commit herself by word and deed to what mattered most to her in life at the moment. For years her friend Bruce Bliven, Jr., had talked of breaking away from journalism to become a novelist, a frustrated ambition that Margaret could well understand. Under the terms of an earlier will dated December 22, 1949, she had bequeathed him the Only House, “hoping,” as she wrote then, “he’ll find it a good place to write in some day.”64 In the document in force at the time of her death, the Only House had become a token of her love for James Rockefeller, “my first of kin and closest.”
By far the most surprising provision of the will concerned the disposition of the majority of Margaret’s royalties. All future earnings from books published during her lifetime, excluding only the Doubleday titles, went to an eight-year-old boy who lived in the York Avenue tenement one passed through on the way to Cobble Court. Albert Clarke III was the son of Joan MacCormick Clarke, whom Margaret had known since the late thirties, when Joan, her brother Jim, their mother, and Jessica Gamble had shared a summer house on Vinalhaven. Joan had been a teenager then. She was now the wife of a struggling musician and mother of three boys. (It was Margaret, most likely, who had helped the young family find their apartment by her studio.)
Albert, like Margaret, was a middle child. He was a beautiful, blond, cherubic boy. Years later Jessica Gamble Dunham would wonder whether Margaret had chosen him as her principal heir because he looked so much like the kind of child she herself might have had. Margaret’s obvious heir, in the sense that she considered him her “first of kin,” plainly did not need the money. It would appear she had determined to put her wealth into the hands of someone to whom it might mean a great deal.
Margaret had already made some provision for the Clarkes’ eldest son, Austin. Among the books due to be published around the time of her death was The Sailor Dog, a Golden Book. Under the terms of the contract insisted upon by Margaret, young Austin was to share equally with her in the royalties and in the author credits. (The boy’s name did appear in the first edition but was subsequently dropped by the publisher.)
“In his precise, little-boy way,” Margaret told her interviewer from the Richmond News Leader months before her death, Austin had explained to her how the hero of the story, a sailor who also happened to be a dog, “lived near the dock, and had a hook for his hat, and a hook for his coat, a hook for his handkerchief.”65 She had shaped and revised the manuscript into its final form, but was entirely serious about considering Austin Clarke her coauthor and partner in creation.
In the spring and summer of 1952, when she drafted the will that named Albert as her principal heir, Margaret had no reason to think she might die any time soon. In all likelihood, had she lived she would have changed matters around again in another year or two, as she had done in the past. Just as Margaret, by her own account, had written her children’s books through a “happy accident,” Albert Clarke III had the great good luck to become her heir.
Immense caches of unpublished manuscripts, in varying states of completion and of widely varying quality, were found at Cobble Court, 186 East End Avenue, and the Only House. It became the large and laborious task of Roberta Rauch and Bruce Bliven, Jr. to determine the copyright status of each of these works and decide which of them might be publishable. It was agreed at the outset that publishers should not be permitted to revise the manuscripts in any appreciable way, that it was preferable to forego publication rather than allow a book to appear in a form Margaret herself might not have sanctioned. Even with this commendable restriction in force, more than twenty books were issued posthumously. While none of these rank with her very best work, several are quite fine: the evocative Wheel on the Chimney, with watercolor paintings by Tibor Gergeley, which chronicled the annual transcontinental migration of storks and was a Caldecott Honor Book for 1952; Three Little Animals; with illustrations by Garth Will
iams, which Margaret had originally conceived as a sequel to Little Fur Family; and Four Fur Feet, illustrated by Remy Charlip, a buoyant lark of a ballad about a fur-clad hero’s farflung travels and dreams:
And as he slept
he dreamed a dream,
dreamed a dream,
dreamed a dream.
And as he slept
he dreamed a dream
that all the world was round—O.66
In addition to the manuscripts that were eventually published, there were scores of others that had been left in an unfinished or not quite finished state. Among these were stories called “The Little Iceberg,” “The Little Wind,” “The Little River,” and one called “The Little Golden Tugboat Book,” which Margaret had subtitled “The Annie Moran, or That Old Tug at My Heart.”67 “The Number Bears: Count to 10 and Count to 10 Again” was planned as a sequel to The Color Kittens: A Child’s First Book About Colors. Margaret had made notes for two sequels to her innovative picture book of art appreciation, The House of a Hundred Windows. “The House of a Hundred Children” was to have been an album of historic art works in which children figured as subjects. In “Here Comes the Sun: A Weather Book,” the paintings were all to have been ones that happened to illustrate different weather conditions.
“The Green Wind” was to have been a major verse collection. With Posey Hurd, Margaret had been at work on a folk tale anthology to be called “Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief,” a sampler of traditional stories about heroes from all walks of life, honorable and otherwise. Also left unfinished was their hotly disputed collaboration, “The Early Milkman.”
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