by Nadia Cohen
American readers did not feel the same way about Beatrix, and if the famous author would not come to them, they would seek her out. To her astonishment, in 1927 an American publisher working in London turned up on her doorstep. Beatrix was astounded that anyone should have travelled so far just to see her, and greeted Alexander McKay warmly. He wanted to offer her a lucrative publishing deal, but she had been unwaveringly loyal to Warnes for years and he was careful not to coerce her into anything she felt unsure of. McKay simply made his case and left £100 on the kitchen table as a way of enticing Beatrix to produce stories with American children in mind. ‘There has been an alarming visitation,’ she wrote afterwards.
An American publisher who took the trouble to come all the way from London in search of a book that does not exist. He produces beautifully illustrated books, there is no question about that. It would vex my old publishers very much, and I don’t like breaking with old friends. Possibly I may arrange to have something published in America for the American market only.
McKay may have found this eccentric English lady strangely secretive, but she had warmed to him. He was a cultured man and took her writing so seriously that she started to change her mind about Americans. From then on Beatrix was uncharacteristically kind and charming whenever tourists made the pilgrimage to Sawrey. Beatrix soon realised that she actually preferred American visitors who she thought were always polite, whereas the local day-trippers from around Lancashire tended to drop litter and stare over the garden gate, without having anything very interesting to say.
When a reader sent a polite request to visit Beatrix from Boston she responded kindly, saying: ‘I always tell nice Americans to send other nice Americans along. You come because you understand the books, and love the same old tales that I do – not from any impertinent curiosity.’
In the end, after a little more gentle persuasion she told McKay she had a story, The Fairy Caravan, which he could publish for the American market only. She had in fact been mulling the story over for some years, and had large chunks of it already written although the notes and fragments lay discarded in the drawers of her writing desk.
Beatrix may not have been feeling particularly creative at this time, but she had not abandoned her strong work ethic entirely. She wanted money to buy more land for The National Trust, and in the end she produced a total of three new books for her American readers. It was the first time she had not written with specific children in mind, but over the next ten years she published The Fairy Caravan, Little Pig Robinson and Sister Anne, insisting that they must only be sold in America, out of loyalty to Warnes. Since publishing them in the UK would have adversely affected Warnes’ profits, Beatrix insisted emphatically to her eager new American publishers that she be allowed to use her married name, Beatrix Heelis, for these new stories in order to clearly distinguish them from her series of little white books.
She filled the pages of The Fairy Caravan with the naughty nocturnal adventures of her Silver Campine hens – Tappie-tourie, Chucky-doddie, Selina Pickcorn – and five others who had a night-time escapade with a ferret called John Stoat. The caravan in the title was a circus troupe of animals who travelled around the hills surrounding Sawrey performing to other animals in their farmyards and fields.
Needless to say their movements and shows were invisible to the baffled humans who also inhabited the villages. The mice, rats, cats and ferrets entertained each other in the camp by sharing stories, many of which Beatrix had originally intended to be books of their own. Clearly Beatrix had lost the self-discipline she had in her youth for cutting her stories down to the bare minimum, allowing her distinctive drawings to tell much of the story with just a few key words on the facing pages. She knew this was not her best work, and even admitted in the introduction: ‘Through many changing seasons, these tales have walked and talked with me. They were not meant for printing. I send them on the insistence of friends beyond the sea.’
Even if she had lost her passion for writing, the subject matter held great appeal. Beatrix had always loved the excitement surrounding travelling circuses, which were popular in the Lake District, particularly in the summer months, and she did her best to ensure she made it to every show. It seemed to be the only form of entertainment she approved of – she disliked pubs and cinemas and almost never went to parties. She wrote in her journal: ‘I would go any distance to see a Caravan (barring lion taming); it is the only species of entertainment I care for.’
The Fairy Caravan did eventually have a small print run in the UK in 1952 to ensure Beatrix would retain the copyright after her death, but it was not much of a critical success. Public opinion did not usually tend to concern Beatrix, but she was not especially proud of this story and feared it would compare unfavourably to her other books and there could be a backlash against her. The last thing she wanted was any more unwanted attention or publicity. She dreaded being forced to make trips down to London to deal with business. She was very happy to have retreated out of the limelight, and was ready to enjoy her peaceful retirement in the countryside. She was relishing her seclusion, and used her married name as a kind of disguise, but when she received her own copies of The Fairy Caravan she distributed them around her friends and neighbours in Sawrey to gauge the public reaction. To her relief they showered her in enthusiastic praise, with many claiming they recognised aspects of themselves in the characters: ‘Our shepherd’s children turn over the pages looking up the references to animal friends again and again. It is very comical how seriously the village has taken it,’ she said.
Relieved by so much positive feedback, Beatrix could relax and managed to convince herself that The Fairy Caravan did compare well with her earlier children’s stories, although literary critics did not agree. It was her longest and most personal book, but since it was largely cobbled together from old discarded fragments and leftovers of other stories which she tied with rather loose threads, the story was flimsy. Most of the farmyard characters were based on her own pets, including a guinea pig she had bought on a rare trip to London, as well as the working sheepdogs and ponies she used on the farm.
The Fairy Caravan proved popular in the States, and American readers quickly clamoured for more. Beatrix was a shrewd enough businesswoman to capitalise on a lucrative opportunity when she saw one, and so she gave them what they wanted. Two more nursery stories followed, Sister Anne and Wag-by-Wall, neither of which compare favourably to the little white books, nor have they stood the test of time.
Sister Anne was a retelling of the Bluebeard pirate story, which had been edited out of The Fairy Caravan by her US publisher David McKay, on the grounds that it was not particularly good work and nor did it reflect her voice or talents. Beatrix’s capabilities were dwindling. She did not have the patience to sit and pour her heart into her work anymore, and it showed. Wag-by-Wall, the story of an old woman who finds a fortune in a stocking, did not have any illustrations at all, nor did it include any animal characters which is all many readers wanted from her.
McKay was unimpressed and urged Beatrix to return to her old notebooks and rough sketches to see what else could possibly be unearthed. Her next offering, Little Pig Robinson, was a story she had begun and discarded as early as 1893. She had long since buried her old habit of giving animals human emotions, having simply been too busy to indulge it, but now that she wanted to give something extra back to the American market it bubbled to the surface once more. She noticed how her long-haired guinea pig Tuppenny looked rather like a Sultan of Zanzibar, and how her pony Dolly loved water and whenever they crossed a stream she ‘Stopped the pony cart and had a good splash.’
Although her poultry helped the farm make a profit, to Beatrix the hens and chickens were all as well-known to her as domestic pets and, unable to break the habit of a lifetime, she gave them all affectionate names. Writing to one of the many children she was in touch with, she asked:
Do you think hens would make a good story? At my house in the country I have got som
e white fowls, which are such dears; they will let me pick them up and stroke them. Some people say that birds are uninteresting but Jemima has done next best to Peter Rabbit.
I am very fond of Silver Campine fowls. They have more character than the general run. Their bright dark eyes are more expressive than the snaky gold and black stare of the usual barn door hen. Henny-Penny, the mother of Charles, was a wonderful layer, and she laid immense white eggs. I could always pick out Henny-Pennys eggs in the basket – but the difficulty was to find them! I think Jemima Puddle-Duck might have taken a lesson from her in the art of hiding nests.
New books inevitably led to greater global acclaim, yet Beatrix continued to shy away from her own notoriety, perhaps as a result of how awkward she had been as a child, or perhaps because she found fame meaningless and empty. Beatrix recalled that when she was a little girl her parents would take her out to art galleries or parties but then pointedly did not introduce her to any of their friends of acquaintances, leading her to believe they must be ashamed of her and that she was not worth speaking to or bothering with. Although she was no longer crippled by shyness, by the time she reached adulthood Beatrix tended to dread having to meet new people, and was generally fearful of strangers: ‘I wonder why I never seem to know people. It makes one wonder if one is presentable. It strikes me it is the way to make one not,’ she wrote.
Even after she had completely reinvented herself in the Lake District in later life, and discovered a little confidence that she had never experienced before, Beatrix was never quite fully free from her old awkward persona and chose to live as a virtual recluse. She hated to be disturbed in her remote hideaway, so every member of staff at Warnes and many of Beatrix’s surrounding neighbours were under strict instructions not to pass on her personal details under any circumstances, regardless of how determined or inquisitive the callers were. Many callers were often quite dogged, particularly foreign tourists who had travelled from abroad in the hope of meeting this woman who was seen as the quintessential English author.
Occasionally tenacious newspaper reporters would turn up at her door requesting an interview. They received blunt refusals at best, and those who were not so lucky were subjected to breath-taking rudeness, which over time had become Beatrix’s default style when it came to unexpected and unwanted visitors interrupting her tranquillity.
The idea of being interviewed and having to talk about herself, something which had been so firmly disapproved of in her childhood, was still deeply horrifying to Beatrix. She had absolutely no sense of vanity so never fell for flattery from journalists, and abhorred the idea of appearing to sound boastful or immodest. Beatrix simply could not begin to understand why anyone would possibly be interested in mundane details about her private life. Besides, she had never been a woman who saw the point in sitting around chatting. In fact, when a rumour spread through surrounding villages that Beatrix was dead she could not have been more delighted. It suited her just fine to go about her business completely incognito.
The only time Beatrix permitted herself to be slightly wooed by positive public relations was when American literary critics praised her writing in an intelligent way which she approved of, and then requested an interview for a literary magazine. Her American readership felt far enough away for Beatrix to find it comforting yet not intrusive. It was one of very few personal interviews she ever gave. Beatrix found herself unexpectedly agreeing after she had been contacted by several key figures in the world of American children’s literature, who to her delight happened to be women – Beatrix had never encountered other women with senior positions in the publishing world before.
Two literary ladies in particular impressed Beatrix with their scholarly attitude towards children’s literature, which was unlike anything she had experienced in Britain. Beatrix found it very refreshing how they considered children to be worthwhile consumers of books in their own right, and appreciated their valuable contribution to a lucrative market, rather than just trying to appeal to parents, librarians and teachers. Beatrix was surprised at how serious these women sounded in their letters and found herself intrigued to meet them, so she took the rare step of inviting them to visit her on the farm.
The first to set sail from Manhattan was Anne Caroll Moore, the Superintendent of Children’s Work in the New York Public Library, followed by Helen Dean Fish who was Children’s Editor of a major New York publishing house. ‘I entirely agree with you about English children’s literature,’ she wrote to Fish following her visit. ‘The authors used to write down to children; now they write twaddling dull stories or odiously slangy stuff.’
Her new literary friends shared Beatrix’s long-running frustration with the pitiful state of the children’s literature market in the UK, and the way publishers only seemed to be interested in making money. In a further letter to Anne Carroll Moore, Beatrix added: ‘There have been classics such as Alice In Wonderland and The Water Babies, but in the main children’s literature has not been taken seriously over here – too much left to the appeal of gaudy covers and binding, and the choice of toy sellers.’
Beatrix was further intrigued when her new friends told her all about a new children’s bookshop in Boston which had a cultural aim of promoting reading at its heart, and how its founder Bertha Mahoney had launched her own magazine, The Horn Book, which was dedicated entirely to children’s books. Ms Mahoney was also a great admirer of Beatrix’s work and in 1925 she began to write to her regularly, urging her to contribute an article or please find the time to answer questions for an interview. Her requests were polite enough but their persistence bothered Beatrix as she feared the magazine was digging for personal information, which she had simply not been prepared to provide in the past.
Beatrix was only too well aware of her reputation as something of a recluse, which in turn had led to false rumours and misinformation about her personal life which she had been happy to ignore for years. However, at this time she felt obliged to correct some of the more persistent mysteries and rumours that had been swirling around her.
She told Anne Carroll Moore:
The letters which ask for particulars about Beatrix Potter’ are very perplexing. I have a most intense dislike to advertisement. (And I have got on quite well enough without it). On the other hand, a mystery is silly, and it invites curiosity. And I object to being supposed to be the wife of Sidney Webb, a member of the late Socialist government. He married a Miss Beatrice Potter – no relation. There were photographs of him in the newspapers, it said his wife had written children’s books.
Perhaps her unprecedented change of heart about talking to the American media had something to do with the steady stream of tourists who began to visit the Lake District every summer, as foreign travel became more affordable and therefore more common. Beatrix explained to Miss Moore that the British ‘trippers’ never seemed to have anything nice to say to her, whereas the visitors from America were always much more respectful, polite and full of praise for her books. She tended to greet them warmly and often stopped for a chat. Sometimes she would even break the habit of a lifetime and invite them in for tea – the complete opposite of her furious reaction to local gawkers.
As she explained in one of her letters to the wife of painter Charles Hopkinson: ‘A good many Americans arrive. We had a very pleasant party of friends from Boston to tea a few weeks ago. However it happens, the class of Americans who take the trouble to call, are quite different from the English.’
Beatrix found she was actually starting to enjoy flattery for the first time, and accepted that not all requests for information were sinister, probing or unwelcome. Miss Moore convinced Beatrix that the quickest way to end the questioning would be to actually give answers to a few of the more pressing ones, which would go some way towards satisfying the insatiable demand. She eventually managed to persuade Beatrix to reveal a few of her writing secrets to The Horn Book as a way to encourage or inspire the many young aspiring writers who looked up to her.
Never does anyone outside your perfidiously complimentary nation write to tell me that I write good prose. I think I write carefully because I enjoy my writing, and enjoy taking pains over it. I have always disliked writing to order; I write to please myself.
My usual way of writing is to scribble, and cut out, and write it again and again. The shorter and plainer the better. And read the Bible (unrevised version and Old Testament) if I feel my style wants chastening.
Her new American friends made Beatrix feel that she was a highly respected and significant cultural figure, whose contribution was so much more than bedtime stories. This was a new feeling for Beatrix and she found she rather liked it. She may have been reluctant to admit it, but it privately bothered Beatrix that she was not taken as seriously as she might have liked in Britain, and she felt that foreign readers had a greater appreciation of her talents.
When the Americans convinced her that her worth was so much more than a row of numbers on a balance sheet, Beatrix began to feel that perhaps her old friends in Bedford Square saw her as a prized investment, a cash cow and nothing more. The only real communication she had from London was financial, receiving brief dispatches from the office attached to accounts, marketing budgets or royalty cheques. Of course she had ordered the terrified staff of Warnes office to leave her in peace so many times that they automatically refused all offers on her behalf and only contacted her when it was strictly necessary.