by Amy Gary
Margaret had been deeply moved by Stein’s book. It clarified for her why her own family was so broken. Her parents’ individual personalities had been formed long before they met and were influenced by their very different families. They once loved each other enough to overlook those differences, but now her father lived on his boat and her mother was alone in the house on Long Island. There were no plans for family gatherings on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Even so, Margaret missed the structure of holiday breaks that had been a part of her college life. She also missed her friends from Hollins. The summer after she graduated, she served as a bridesmaid in four weddings, but as each friend left the church on the arm of her new husband, Margaret knew the couple was walking off into a life that eventually left her behind. The things she and her now married girlfriends once had in common would erode, especially when children came along. Before long, Margaret knew the letters that bridged her and her friends’ distance would cease and they would lose touch completely.
She tried not to think too hard about the future and kept herself busy. There was always something to do in the city. She visited museums and took classes at The Art Students League of New York. Her instructor had her paint only color with no shape or intention so she could understand the moods colors could evoke. Then she molded forms with clay to get a feel for dimension. After days of that, she painted still lifes and nude model after nude model. This soon bored her. She decided to save money by quitting the class and painting her own pile of fruits and vegetables.
After that, she took a short story course at Columbia University, where Basil Rauch, her new brother-in-law, was earning his doctorate in history. Basil was far too serious for Margaret’s taste, but he suited her docile sister. Basil and Roberta lived close by, and the sisters had become closer in recent months. Margaret teased Basil about his somber dark brown tweed suits, and he considered it an amusing challenge to find interesting dinner companions for Margaret. A parade of professors, writers, and editors were served at his and Roberta’s table, but Margaret found most of them too gentle and dreary. She had no trouble finding good-looking young men with more money than intellect to accompany her to plays, movies, and restaurants around the city. Inevitably, though, she would cast them off, too. They were fun but unable to hold a decent conversation.
She loved living in the city. At night, she lay in her bed and listened to the city grow so quiet she could hear the click of heels on sidewalks and the shutter of the traffic lights as they changed from red to green. She woke early to write and watch the city come to life. When she walked through her Greenwich Village neighborhood, she chatted with street vendors and shopkeepers around Washington Square Park. She helped the French baker around the corner with his English, and he gave her lessons on the French horn in return. Every week, she bought a bouquet of flowers to liven her tiny apartment. She loved how almost anything could be found in the city. In the depths of winter, she discovered white narcissus for sale in the subway, and for a few cents, she bought the memory of spring.
* * *
The Great Depression still gripped most of the nation, but the Browns saw no changes in their lifestyles due to the economic downturn. Margaret continued to receive a healthy allowance, and the Browns went on vacations across the country and to Europe. On a family skiing vacation in Lausanne, Switzerland, Margaret met the pretender to the defunct Spanish crown, Infante Juan, count of Barcelona. They dined and skied, and although their relationship wasn’t serious, it was often mentioned by her family that she once dated the prince of Spain.
Margaret’s father had grown tired of waiting for her to marry or find permanent work. He threatened to cut off her allowance and force her to move home if she didn’t find a full-time job or a husband soon.
Margaret was desperate to stay in the city. She confessed her hopes and exasperation in letters to her former English professor Marguerite Hearsey. In one, Margaret shared her dream to write great literature and in the next was resigned that she might as well give up and marry a good man. Dr. Hearsey encouraged Margaret to continue to write—her talent and literary foundation would eventually open the necessary doors.
Margaret wasn’t so sure. A year after graduating, she had convinced her father to pay for her to take a couple of graduate courses at the University of Virginia. There she rented a charming house from Stringfellow Barr, a lauded history professor who allowed Margaret to sit in on his renowned literary salon. She made many editorial connections through Stringfellow and pressed her new friends to consider her short stories for publication. No one, though, wanted to buy, and she wasn’t quite sure why.
As Margaret sat in Stein’s lecture, listening to the famous author discuss repetition in writing as a way to reinforce understanding, Margaret felt inspired. The author had stepped onto the stage in heavy, low-heeled shoes. She wore her signature long tweed skirt topped by a white collared shirt and black vest and approached the lectern without looking at the crowded auditorium. She launched into her speech and kept her eyes on the papers in front of her. After several minutes, she lifted her gaze and asked the audience if they understood what she was saying. Polite nods assured her they did.
This was particularly true for Margaret, who listened to Stein speak and instantly recognized the simple beauty of the great author’s style. Stein’s reliable rhythms created a cadence that bound the reader to the page. Repetition allowed readers to grasp a basic premise, and then, by turning phrases over and over, successive layers of understanding were peeled away.
Margaret realized that everything she respected about Stein’s style was lacking in her own muddled work. Her short stories and articles were obtuse and elitist. She used her own privileged life as the basis for everything she wrote, while Stein’s easygoing verse sprang from universal themes. Stein’s language was clear and concise, but behind those unpretentious words lay complex meanings. Meanwhile, Margaret’s writing was overblown and haughty.
Before this moment, Margaret had believed that formality was what literature required, but now she saw how a simple approach was possible and even respected by critics. She grasped the mechanics and the deep emotional well of Stein’s style and was electrified. She saw the same things in Stein’s verse that she’d come to understand in nature and art. There was always something new to discover in both because our lives and perspectives were always changing. The same type of daisy she had picked and admired as a child was certainly similar to one she might pick today; what changed was the way she saw the flower. This was true of great literature like Stein’s. It endured because it opened the door for a reader to embark on an ever-changing road of self-discovery.
For a long time, Margaret had felt like uncooked green peas whirling about in a pot, hoping to become a properly prepared dish. Now she was ready to write in a whole new style. She walked out of the lecture hall more determined than ever to become a writer of importance.
* * *
Margaret continued to write and hone her style, but by the beginning of 1935, she hadn’t sold a manuscript. At her father’s insistence, she moved back home to live with her mother. Margaret distracted herself by joining with a group of fellow Long Islanders to start the Buckram Beagles, a hunting club. Its members and their guests gathered each weekend in the fall and spring to run for hours through the island’s vast estates behind the hounds. Their prey was imported Austrian hares, a long-legged jackrabbit traditionally used in the sport. The hunt was capped by a dinner or tea on one of the estates, and Margaret was grateful for the opportunity to chat with these new friends even though the topic always seemed to be the habits of rabbits. At the teas and dinners that followed the hunts, the conversations were engaging, and Margaret met the most interesting people. She befriended a woman who had been the head of the Red Cross in France during the Great War and the man who was heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. He preferred to bend the rules of the sport by following the runners on horseback, but no one complained because they often hunted on his land. Whe
never possible, Margaret traveled with the club as it competed against other kennels in field trials around Long Island and as far away as South Carolina. She hated being at home with her mother, who was skilled at finding inane errands for Margaret to run.
That next spring, Margaret escaped Long Island by finding work as a live-in tutor through one of her beagling friends. Her charge was Dorothy “Dot” Wagstaff, a twelve-year-old girl who had been sick and had fallen behind at her private school in Manhattan. Margaret’s primary job was to make certain Dot caught up with her class and passed her end-of-year exams.
Dot reminded Margaret of herself at that age. The young girl had a keen mind, but like Margaret, hated sitting still to do her schoolwork. She would rather be playing with her dog or at the stables with her horse whenever possible. She didn’t work efficiently and watched the clock instead of paying attention to what she had to learn. Margaret enjoyed finding ways to interest Dot in her studies. She also developed a reward system that encouraged Dot to focus her efforts intensely so they could go to museums, movies, or horseback riding.
When they rode horses together, Margaret sang hunting songs, show tunes, and ballads. A song titled “Abdul Abulbul Amir” was one of Margaret’s favorites. It told the mournful tale of two men who fight to the death in a battle of outrageous pride. Her recall of lyrics was impressive, and she amused Dot with her performances while in the saddle.
When Margaret discovered that Dot was an exceptional artist, Margaret taught her the techniques she had learned at the Art Students League. Dot preferred to paint her horse and dogs instead of landscapes or people, but her knowledge of the animals’ muscles and movements shone through in her art. At the end of the school year, Dot passed all her exams, and Margaret was thrilled. Teaching could be exciting, and most surprising of all, Margaret was really good at it.
* * *
Another of Margaret’s beagling friends had recently earned her teaching certification through the Bureau of Educational Experiments, or Bank Street, as it was commonly called due to its location. The friend praised the vitality and creativity of the school’s progressive program, so Margaret filled out an application. She was accepted into the teaching college for their fall term and hired on the spot as a teacher’s aide for a class of eight-year-olds at one of Bank Street’s associated schools.
Bank Street’s founder was Lucy Sprague Mitchell, a brilliant, fast-talking, chain-smoking educator who had previously been the dean of women at the University of California in Berkeley. While at Berkeley, Lucy had grown frustrated that the only jobs available to her graduate students were as teachers or nurses, even with their advanced degrees. In 1919, when Lucy left the highest realms of education to start Bank Street, the courses being offered at women’s schools were clearly inferior to the ones offered to men. Lucy believed that those less rigorous undergraduate classes kept women from meeting requirements to enter many graduate programs and thus advance in their careers. Until girls were held to the same demanding educational standards as boys, their vocational options would remain limited.
Moving women out of their standard career roles and prescribed subservience in marriage would take time. Girls had to see themselves as equals, and it had to begin at the early levels of education. Boys also had to see girls as true peers, and teaching methods needed to be reformed for this revolution to take hold.
Lucy had studied theories on education and had been deeply influenced by John Dewey’s groundbreaking ideas. He believed education should be a cooperative adventure between teachers and students and that collaboration would naturally foster equal-minded children. Dewey held that children learned better through a hands-on approach and proposed a less regimented curriculum that didn’t force children to memorize mountains of information. Instead, a teacher was to be a facilitator instead of an instructor. They were to guide and encourage children as they learned. All children, he believed, were explorers on the greatest journey of their lives—that of childhood.
* * *
Lucy admired Dewey’s philosophies but felt his methods required testing on a broad basis. Fortunately, Lucy received a generous inheritance and used it to fund a school laboratory—thus Bank Street was born. Bank Street began as a center where psychologists and educators could test and share new approaches for teaching.
It wasn’t long, though, before Lucy realized that math and science easily conformed to a fair-minded classroom. What challenged her was finding children’s literature that didn’t subjugate women. Fairy tales often positioned marriage as the ultimate goal for a girl. Moreover, the violence and questionable morality of the characters in those stories were not appropriate for children. She needed literature that reflected children’s lives in an evenhanded way.
The curriculum Lucy needed to support their classrooms simply didn’t exist, so she created it. By the time Margaret arrived at the school’s front door, Lucy’s textbook, a thick collection of stories and rhymes, had been used for more than a dozen years in progressive schools. Lucy labeled her book and the literature movement behind it the Here-and-Now philosophy. Her writings met children at their own stages of development—where they were emotionally and psychologically at that moment. Children became more aware of the larger world as they grew. Two-year-olds’ perceptions and interests differed vastly from six-year-olds’. Stories about Mother, Father, bed, and breakfast were fascinating subjects for a toddler. By the age of six, they were more interested in the outside world. They were not only curious about vehicles and buildings but how they were made.
* * *
Margaret walked into Bank Street at the most opportune moment. Lucy had been hired to write another large collection of stories and poems in the Here-and-Now style for her publisher, Dutton. The last book had consumed an inordinate amount of her time, and she knew she needed help to meet the publisher’s deadline. She was looking to hire an editor and author for their new publications staff. Margaret’s graduate writing courses coupled with the psychology classes at Hollins qualified her for an interview. Lucy was impressed with the pretty blond girl’s quick mind and spunk. On a hunch, Lucy hired her, and although it was only a part-time position, Margaret’s writing career was finally about to take flight.
Margaret was thrilled to be earning money as a writer, even if it was for a children’s textbook. Her days were packed. She woke early in the morning to write, then reported to her classroom of eight-year-olds at the Little Red Schoolhouse. There, Margaret read manuscripts to her class and others. She kept extensive notes on what captured the children’s attention and what bored them. The children, too, shared stories, songs, and poems with Margaret so she could home in on the words they used at each age level. Margaret hurriedly wrote down what the children said and then created lists of age-appropriate words. She listened to the way they described the world around them, and in their words, Margaret recognized flashes of true poetry. She was in awe of how naturally the children expressed themselves.
Afternoons were spent at Bank Street, where Margaret took courses necessary for teacher certification or chased behind Lucy, sharing her notes on which manuscripts did or didn’t work in front of the young audiences. It was soon clear to Margaret that her own stories lacked a certain spark. Her writing was stilted; not at all as effortless as a child’s own language. It took a while for Margaret to understand what felt false in her simple lines, but one day she realized she was talking down to children in her writing. She was handing them a version of their world filtered through her words, emotions, and eyes. Somewhere along the way, she, like most adults, had forgotten how it felt to be a child.
Books and music had helped Margaret escape the walls of her boarding school; stories and songs had lifted her from her own troubles and transported her into a carefree world. That was what she wanted to do in her own writing, but adulthood had dulled those memories. Her senses, once so keen as a child’s, had a blanket over them. Even in recalling those days, Margaret was revisiting them as a grown woman with a diffe
rent perspective. If she were ever to write honestly for children, she’d need to be able to see the world as they saw it. Margaret became convinced that she needed to recapture the pleasures and frustrations of childhood.
She returned to the fields and woods of Long Island and physically positioned herself to see things from a child’s point of view. She picked daisies, watched bugs crawl, and gazed at clouds floating by. But it was going to take more than seeing the world from a child’s physical vantage point to capture those moments clearly. She had to experience it as a child would, with a sense of awe and wonder. That was the real key to writing for children. She had to love, really love, what they loved.
When writing about a certain topic, Margaret would spend days studying the subject. When writing about farms, she drove to the north end of Long Island and picked potatoes in the hot summer sun. To write about boats, she spent days at the Hudson and East River docks, watching ships come and go, learning sailors’ songs, and talking to the tugboat captains. She even paddled a canoe around Manhattan. She recalled her childhood days of walking on these same docks and the way the cargo and rivers changed with the seasons. She struggled to remember what it felt like as a young girl to watch her father sail away; she tried to recall her overwhelming fear that he would never return and also her joy when he came home with gifts from exotic lands.
After studying every aspect of boats, sailors, and the sea that she could, she led a group of students that varied in ages to the same docks. She noted what impressed them, what generated questions, and what language they used to describe what they saw. On any given day, they might visit a skyscraper or she might lead an expedition to the zoo to watch the seals swim. The day after she wrote a poem on bees, she and the students buzzed around the classroom together, pretending to be bees.