by Jill Lepore
Meanwhile, Life was struggling, $3 million in the red. “We have to get more and more remarkable pictures,” Luce ordered.31 The first week of April 1938, Life’s editors warned subscribers of a forthcoming story “without precedent among general magazines”: “If your copy of LIFE is read by children, this letter will give you time in which to make up your mind whether they shall the see the story and under what conditions.”32 (Rejected was the idea of selling newsstand copies bound with a tape reading, “This issue of LIFE to be sold to adults only.”) Apparently, very few subscribers received the warning before the magazine, since the letter was sent by third-class mail. Life also sent advance notices to nearly four thousand newspapermen; another four thousand to schoolteachers, mayors, and heads of women’s clubs; two thousand letters to Protestant clergymen; and more than three thousand to doctors and hospitals.33
The offending issue contained a removable centerfold—the pages were supposed to arrive uncut—called “The Birth of a Baby.” It consisted of thirty-five quite small black-and-white stills from a documentary film of the same title. For all the hoopla, the pictures were hardly prurient. The woman pictured was an actress named Eleanor King, and not pregnant.34 The photographs contain no nudity (not even, really, the baby’s). The caption for frame 25 reads: “Dr. Wilson supports the head as the body emerges and slowly turns, but lets the mother actually expel the baby.” The baby emerges amid a sea of drapes.35
All the same, the stunt worked. Eleanor Roosevelt said she found that issue of Life “completely engrossing.”36 The film was shown in fifteen states. One reporter made the not unreasonable claim that “almost overnight, The Birth of a Baby became the most discussed picture since The Birth of a Nation.”37 Life’s “Birth of a Baby” issue was banned all over the country. By April 15, municipal officials in fifty cities in New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Kansas, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and every New England state had prevented its distribution, seizing copies from newsstands and threatening and arresting newsdealers. (Life paid all of the newsdealers’ legal fees.) Pittsburgh safety director George E. A. Fairley ordered it off the city’s newsstands, declaring, “The magazine outrages all common decency.” When a Tucson police chief banned the sale of the magazine at newsstands, the Arizona Daily Star offered to sell it from its offices. In the Bronx, a Catholic district attorney named Samuel J. Foley called the photographs “lewd, lascivious, obscene” and “an outrageous affront.”38 Bronx police seized four thousand copies. After four Bronx newsdealers were arrested, Roy Larsen, Life’s publisher, went to Foley’s office, sold a copy of the magazine to a policeman for a quarter, and was put in handcuffs. Larsen’s trial began on April 19. Two days later, George Gallup issued the results of a nationwide poll. Asked, “In your opinion do these pictures violate the law against publication of ma-terial which is obscene, filthy or indecent?,” 24 percent of respondents said yes; 76 percent, no. On April 26, a Bronx court ruled that the photographs were not indecent, and Larsen was released.39
This was just the kind of malarkey Harold Ross hated. The week after Life published “The Birth of a Baby,” the New Yorker published a lampoon called “The Birth of an Adult,” with text written by E. B. White accompanied by stills of a fictitious film—drawings by Rea Irvin, the artist who created Eustace Tilley—portraying “the waning phenomenon of adulthood.” (Frame 1: “The Birth of an Adult is presented with no particular regard for good taste. The editors feel that adults are so rare, no question of taste is involved.”) “The decrease in the number of mature persons in the world is a shocking indictment of our civilization,” White wrote. That might have been satisfying but, in the meantime, seventeen million adults had seen that issue of Life. The New Yorker published a cartoon of two mailmen shouldering mail sacks stuffed with Life; one says, “If their circulation keeps going up, Joe, I swear I can’t go on.”40
At just that moment, E. B. White returned to his mouse. “I have written a fine parody of Life’s ‘The Birth of a Baby,’ ” he wrote to James Thurber on April 16, 1938. “I also have a children’s book about half done.”41 He had finally opened his desk drawer. White wrote that letter from North Brooklin, Maine, population 800, where the Whites had just moved. North Brooklin was about sixty miles from C. C. Little’s mouse laboratory, in Bar Harbor. White gave his mouse a last name.
White next made a study of children’s literature. In a November 1938 essay for Harper’s, he complained that his house was chockablock with review copies of children’s books, two hundred of them, sent to his wife by publishers; they were spilling out of the cupboards, stuck under sofa cushions, tumbling out of the wood box. About the only one he liked was Dr. Seuss’s The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. The rest were ruthlessly cloying, horribly written, and hopelessly naïve. (“One laughs in demoniac glee,” White wrote, “but this laugh has a hollow sound.”) What White found most depressing—and he was pretty discouraged in 1938, which he called “this year of infinite terror”—was the looming war that threatened to make the whole planet unsuitable for anyone, while, in the world of children’s literature, “adults with blueprints of bombproof shelters sticking from their pants pockets solemnly caution their little ones against running downstairs with lollypops in their mouths.”42
In his Harper’s essay, White mused, as if he were merely mulling it over, that “it must be a lot of fun to write for children—reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work.” After Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) pointed White’s essay out to Anne Carroll Moore, she wasted no time in sending White a letter. “I wish to goodness you would do a real children’s book yourself,” she wrote, from a return address of “Behind the Lions.” “I feel sure you could, if you would, and I assure you the Library Lions would roar with all their might in its praise.” White replied that he had, in fact, started writing a children’s book but was finding it difficult. “I really only go at it when I am laid up in bed, sick, and lately I have been enjoying fine health. My fears about writing for children are great—one can so easily slip into a cheap sort of whimsy or cuteness. I don’t trust myself in this treacherous field unless I am running a degree of fever.”43
Moore pursued the correspondence. In early 1939, she pressed upon White no fewer than five letters. She sent him copies of her reviews. She gave him writing tips: “Let it flow, without criticizing it too close to its creation.” She inquired after his family, asking, more than once, for his child’s name. She was very, very keen to make the acquaintance of his wife: “I’d like to include Mrs. E.B. White in this letter for two reasons. The first that she is mother of the boy, or is it a girl? And second because she reviews children’s books for the New Yorker or some other magazine.” Most of all, she begged him to get back to his children’s book. “Can’t you achieve a temperature, without getting sick and finish it off ?” She was attempting, as she often did, not only to cultivate this author but to claim him. “No one is more interested than I when your children’s book is ready,” Moore wrote on February 18. “Let me know if I can be of service at any stage.”44
In April 1939, White sent an unfinished manuscript to his editor at Harper & Row, Eugene Saxton. “It would seem to be for children, but I’m not fussy who reads it,” White offered, adding, “You will be shocked and grieved to discover that the principal character in the story has somewhat the attributes and appearance of a mouse.” Saxton was far from grieved. He wanted Stuart Little, for a fall 1939 publication date. Anne Carroll Moore would have liked that, too; she was dying to take credit for the book. But that mouse would have to wait for a pack animal to budge. As White gently warned the pestering librarian, “I pull back like a mule at the slightest goading.”45
Two books that were published in 1939, Gertrude Stein’s children’s book The World Is Round and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, reveal a bit more about what was turning into a baby battle of the books. Of Stein’s book, Anne Carroll Moore approved, with much enthusiasm. Katharine White fou
nd it numbingly insipid. (It begins, “Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around. Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was.”) In her New Yorker column, White took aim at Moore: “A number of experts in children’s literature have pronounced ‘The World Is Round’ a good book, but that does not surprise me, since, with a few exceptions, the critics of children’s books are remarkably lenient souls. They seem to regard books for children with the same tolerant tenderness with which nearly any adult regards a child. Most of us assume there is something good in every child; the critics go on from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory.”46
The Grapes of Wrath met with the disapproval not of Anne Carroll Moore but of Annie Dollard, the librarian of a private subscription library in Brooklin. “She was a tiny spinster with firm convictions about which books were fit to read,” Katharine wrote. “The library had acquired ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ but Annie took it off the shelf and placed it on her chair and sat on it. That solved that.”47 Of course, that didn’t solve that, and Katharine White decided to do something about it. Those two hundred review copies her husband had been tripping over before Christmas? She hauled them to the Brooklin library.48
On November 26, 1939, the day after her “Children’s Shelf” column was printed in the New Yorker, Katharine White wrote to “Miss Moore” for the first time, delicately hinting that the librarian ought to stop bothering her husband about Stuart Little—“I’ve decided that the less we say the sooner it will be done”—and steering the correspondence in another direction by seeking advice about how to apply for Carnegie funds for the Brooklin library. She also inquired, a little wickedly, after recommendations from the formidably humorless Moore for material for an anthology she and her husband were compiling, A Subtreasury of American Humor.49
Anne Carroll Moore did not write to E. B. White again until February 1941, alerting him, in confidence, of her plan to retire from the New York Public Library. “I am telling you because I would love to make one of my very final recommendations a large order for E. B. White’s children’s book,” she wrote. White sent his congratulations, saying, “Mrs. White & I were interested to learn of your forthcoming retirement in the fall, & are impressed by your long and fruitful service to the children of the world. It is really one of the great and honorable careers—none finer.” Of Moore’s wanting to wheedle Stuart Little out of him as the capstone of her career, he did not utter a word. In her own letter, Katharine was sly. “Miss Moore,” she began, “Children’s literature cannot spare you.”50
Katharine White had by now become something of a librarian herself. “Public libraries have more and more seemed to me a democratic necessity,” she wrote in 1942, “so most of my war efforts so far, instead of going into civilian defense proper, have been devoted to keeping alive the little library in this town.” Three years after she started her work, she reported to Moore that, what with all of her donations of the New Yorker’s review copies, her little library, now public and incorporated, and with vastly expanded hours, boasted “the best collection of children’s books in the country.” The only reason she was still continuing on the “Children’s Shelf,” she wrote, probably not entirely in jest, “is to have the books for the Brooklin Library.”51
Her experience in Brooklin, however, only confirmed Katharine White’s cynicism about children’s literature. To her friend Louise Bechtel she wrote in 1941, “I think children’s rooms must have greatly increased the children’s reading and widened their horizons. Just to have the books assembled where they can be seen by the kids is all to the good. However, it occurs to me that there is a real danger in it and that is that these rooms isolate young readers and make it less easy for them to explore the books in the library proper.” She laid much of the problem in the laps of librarians in big cities: “What public libraries need for kids, to my mind, are tough-minded, imaginative women, and men, too, as children’s librarians … but I’m almost willing to bet that such librarians are easier to find in the small town library than in the big city library where the children’s specialist holds sway.”52
Katharine White believed, passionately, in public libraries, and in stocking them with books for children. What worried her were tiny spinsters sitting on books. Making a room for children is one thing. Guarding the door is entirely another. And then there’s the matter of setting traps for mice.
The Subtreasury of American Humor was published in 1941. As for including humor from children’s books: “We gave it up,” the Whites confessed; they couldn’t find any. Ross’s battle with Luce raged on. E. B. White wrote a parody of a Life circulation announcement. Ross wanted to publish it in the Times, asking a colleague, “Too strong? But what the hell?” The plan was axed. An editor at Fortune alerted Ross to a New Yorker prank involving Luce’s wife’s underwear. “I don’t know any more about it than you do,” Ross wrote. “But I do know that there are a great many sallies of one kind or another between our two offices. It’s morbid.” By now, everybody was busy covering the war. “Honest to Christ,” Ross wrote, “I’m more dilapidated at the moment than Yugoslavia.”53
Meanwhile, Katharine White kept up her editorial work and her column, where she disagreed, as ever, with the librarian she only ever addressed as “Miss Moore.” Moore adored Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 Little Prince; White reported: “Every child I’ve ever pressed that one on was bored to death.” In the winter of 1943–44, the Whites moved back to New York, to a top-floor apartment looking out on West Eleventh Street. Katharine began editing Nabokov. Her husband’s nerves were shot. He felt like he had “mice in the subconscious”: “The mouse of Thought infests my head, / He knows my cupboard and the crumb.” Then, miraculously, over eight weeks in late 1944 and early 1945, he finally finished the book he had been writing all his life. Saxton, White’s editor, had died in 1943. White sent the manuscript to Ursula Nordstrom, the director of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls, who was known as the Maxwell Perkins of children’s publishing; so great was her influence that she sometimes called herself Ursula Carroll Moore. (When the real Moore asked Nordstrom what could possibly qualify her to edit children’s books, Nordstrom shot back, “Well, I am a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing.”)54
Anne Carroll Moore had been waiting for Stuart Little for seven years. During all this time, she had claimed E. B. White, the most celebrated American essayist of the century, as her writer. She may have been retired, but even in her retirement, her powers had scarcely dimmed. She still showed up for meetings at the New York Public Library; she even still ran those meetings, much to the dismay of her successor, Frances Clarke Sayers, who tried switching meeting places, to no avail. “No matter where you held them,” Sayers remarked, “she was there.” (In an oral history conducted at UCLA in the 1970s, Sayers admitted that she found it all but impossible to stand up to Moore, a pitiless tyrant who made her life “an absolute hell”; reduced Sayers’s staff to tears by ripping up their lists of recommended books and substituting her own; and refused, utterly refused, to cede power: “She hung onto everything.”)55 Moore had come to think of recruiting E. B. White to the world of juvenilia as her final triumph—a victory over Tonstant Weader, a victory over Katharine White. Stuart Little was to be Anne Carroll Moore’s lasting legacy to children’s literature. In her mind, it was her book. There was nothing for it: Nordstrom sent her a set of galley proofs.
“I never was so disappointed in a book in my life,” Moore announced.56 She demanded that Nordstrom visit her at her rooms at the Grosvenor Hotel, where she warned her that the book “musn’t be published.”57 She sent the Whites a fourteen-page letter, predicting that the book would fail and that it would prove an embarrassment and begging White to reconsider its publication. Exactly what the letter said is hard, now, to know. The Whites threw it away—“in
disgust,” Katharine reported. (Katharine White later insisted that Moore wrote not one letter but three: a relatively timid one to her husband and at least two more to her, each more vicious than the last.)58 Even in what looks to be a redacted form—only six pages of a dubious copy in Moore’s hand, rather than a typed carbon, survive—Moore’s criticisms were severe: the story was “out of hand”; Stuart was always “staggering out of scale.” Worse, White had blurred reality and fantasy—“the two worlds were all mixed up”—and children wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. “She said something about its having been written by a sick mind,” E. B. White remembered. About one thing, everyone agreed: Moore made a threat and meant to carry it out. “I fear Stuart Little will be very difficult to place in libraries and schools all over the country,” she warned.59
“It is unnerving to be told you’re bad for children,” E. B. White allowed, “but I detected in Miss Moore’s letter an assumption that there are rules governing the writing of juvenile literature—rules as inflexible as the rules for lawn tennis. And this I was not sure of.” In the end, he shrugged it off. “Children can sail easily over the fence that separates reality from make-believe,” he figured. “They go over it like little springboks. A fence that can throw a librarian is as nothing to a child.”60
White did not write back. His wife did. “K refused to show me her reply,” White told his brother, “but I suspect it set a new world’s record for poisoned courtesy.” It did and it didn’t. “I agree with you that schools won’t be likely to use ‘Stuart Little,’ ” Katharine wrote to Miss Moore, “but, to be very frank, just as you have been, I can’t imagine libraries not stocking it.” And she couldn’t help asking, “Didn’t you think it even funny?”61