Margaret Wise Brown Read online

  By almost any standard, Another Here and Now Story Book had been a success. Sales of the book were excellent, with a third printing required within a month of its publication in March of 1937, and reviews were generally favorable. The United Press news service called the new anthology “an important contribution to progressive child education.”19 The New York Times, in its thoughtful and balanced appraisal, found the book better than the earlier Here and Now volume, which the reviewer noted had pioneered a significant new kind of literature for young children.

  Sixteen years ago, . . . [Mitchell’s] idea was so new as to be startling, even a little shocking, but with the passage of time this type of story has come to be better understood. What the story of everyday things does for the little child is recognized; also the fact that its advocates are not bent on driving out the tale of imagination and fancy.20

  The progressive education movement itself seemed a good deal less startling to large segments of the American public than it had just fifteen or twenty years earlier. In the early 1920s, when Mitchell’s first Here and Now Story Book was published, there were perhaps two dozen nursery schools in the United States; by 1936 such schools numbered well into the hundreds. A Time magazine cover story would soon declare that progressive education had entered the American mainstream.21

  A striking indication of this shift in attitudes can be found in the Horn Book magazine’s May/June 1937 number. The journal’s editor, Bertha E. Mahony, hailed the new Bank Street book with respectful appreciation and a changed mind. Recalling that when Mitchell’s first story collection appeared she had been among the doubters, Mahony explained, “We feared that, if the boundaries in the content of stories for little children were fixed too tightly to familiar and seen things, the element of wonder would be lost.”22

  Another Here and Now Story Book included pieces about rural life as well as those about urban experiences. (Evidently Mahony, like many of her colleagues in the children’s book field, continued to associate “innocent” childhood primarily with rural nature and to mistrust the urban as artificial and spiritually debased.) The new anthology was more varied in other ways as well, with stories “centering in emotional situations and [with] frankly humorous ones.” As the critic gracefully conceded, the sheer gaiety of the book“lowered our defences and made us the freer to examine Mrs. Mitchell’s point of view.”

  The May/June issue of the Horn Book also reprinted a poem by Mitchell from the book and a profile of her coauthored by Margaret and a fellow contributor to the volume, Mary Phelps. Seizing the moment, they proclaimed that

  when Mrs. Mitchell began to publish, in 1921, there appeared a new kind of author for children. Combining a scientist’s command of modern child study with the insight of an unusually gifted teacher, she knew children well enough to understand what is their reality, what their confusion, at different levels of growth. Believing the art experience in all its beauty and delight is their proper heritage, she realized that it can be given them in full measure only by writers in whom the creative genius unites with real understanding of how children grow.23

  However, resistance within the library world had by no means come to an end and would linger on to cloud, to some extent, the reception of some of Margaret’s most original books.

  It had been largely a matter of chance that enough more or less talented writers were available to Lucy Mitchell to produce Another Here and Now Story Book. She now moved to replace chance with something like scientific predictability. Mitchell conceived of creating an elite group within the school whose primary objective would be to develop their craft as writers. Margaret and her colleagues became the charter members of the Bank Street Writers Laboratory. The group met for the first time in October of 1937.

  In principle, the Bank Street community had always aspired to ethnic and racial diversity. But in practice, as most of the school’s active recruitment of teacher trainees was done at Radcliffe and the other Seven Sisters colleges, nearly all of the twenty to thirty annual entrants to the program were white, middle-class women.

  Mitchell saw the Writers Laboratory as an opportunity to take a concrete step toward rectifying this situation. Early in the summer of 1937, she established a special scholarship to support a young black writer interested in joining the new workshop. In her usual practical-minded, well-intentioned, and proprietary way, she dispatched Margaret as an envoy to Harlem to recruit a suitable candidate.

  Margaret headed uptown to West 136th Street, to the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library, where she found the children’s librarian, Augusta Baker, waiting for her. Baker, who was well known to the city’s children as a storyteller, escorted Margaret past the ranges of shelves, answering her many questions.

  On the whole, Baker explained, Harlem children read what other city youngsters read: Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, The Wind in Willows, Andrew Lang’s Rainbow fairy tale collections—the “classics,” most of them imported from England. There were pitifully few books that reflected black children’s own experiences and cultural heritage. Only a handful of black writers had attempted such books. James Weldon Johnson, the patriarch of the Harlem literary renaissance, was not among them, although he took a keen personal interest in the young people of the Harlem community and Johnson’s bravura creation poem, “God’s Trombones,” was read by older children who came to the library.

  The classic work of African-American folklore, the Brer Rabbit stories, sat unread on the shelves. The children, Baker reported, found it hard to make out the dialect of the centuries-old tales, which had been written down and published during the 1880s by a white Southern journalist, Joel Chandler Harris. In most important respects Harris had been faithful to the traditional black storytellers’ narrative art and to the Gulla dialect. But there had also been patently racist blackface Brer Rabbit parodies, like Uncle Pappy Sings, a copy of which Baker showed Margaret and which the latter described in her report to Mitchell as a “white (trash) imitation” of the original. “It had good rythm [sic],” Margaret noted, straining for objectivity, but, as the librarian had told her, children “both resented and didn’t understand the dielect [sic].”24 The children Baker read to did enjoy the stirring poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, even though Dunbar himself sometimes resorted to dialect and did not write specifically with children in mind. A few African adventure stories were also available. Baker expressed her delight in Lucy Mitchell’s eagerness to encourage the writing of books about black children’s own lives. The librarian, whose husband was a local WPA administrator, promised to pass the word about the Writers Laboratory scholarship.

  Baker’s comments on the Brer Rabbit tales were of particular interest to Margaret, who was just then working on her own edition of the stories—attempting a simplification of the dialect that she hoped would retain the flavor and energy of the original. Baker invited her to return to Harlem to test her manuscript, Bank Street—style, at the library’s story hour.

  This Margaret did from time to time over the summer of 1937, which she spent partly in New York and partly on a rented potato farm, Ploughed Fields, at the far end of Long Island. She wrote Lucy Mitchell from the farm, “The more I work on [Brer Rabbit] the more inevitable it seems and the more lost I am in admiration of the form and vitality of some of those stories.”25 Struggling with the knotty problem that Augusta Baker had alluded to, Margaret wondered how much of the dialect as set down by Harris to leave intact. “It is the rythm [sic] and timing and the underlying cadence that gives strength and charm, not the dielect [sic].” But she wavered on this point, fearful of draining the tales of their character. Baker’s comments had reminded her of the delicate balance between authenticity and simplicity that she would need to strike.

  There seemed a good chance that Harper would publish the book (they eventually did, in the fall of 1941), “but whether they decide to take it or not I’m going to do it. It seems one tangable [sic] thing that can be done”—one contribution, that is, to the cause of racial equa
lity. “If any one can do it better, I hope they do, sooner or later, only I think I can do it.”

  Margaret’s versions of the stories gradually emerged. In “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” the best known of all Brer Rabbit tales, Harris’ line “Brer Rabbit come prancin’ ‘long twel he spy de Tar-Baby” became “Brer Rabbit he came prancing along until he spied the Tar-Baby.”26 Harris’ “Youer stuck up, dat’s w’at you is . . .” became “You’re stuck up, dat’s what you is . . . and I’m gwineter cure you.”27

  In addition to modifications of the dialect, Margaret made another, more significant change, eliminating the narrative frame that Harris had devised in order to render the tales more palatable to his overwhelmingly white audience. Harris had interposed a seven-year-old “little white boy” who was heard to converse with the old slave storyteller in the passages introducing each tale. One by one, Remus told his beguiling tales for the boy’s amusement. By discarding Harris’ device and presenting the stories on their own, Margaret brought them a full step closer to their authentic origins in the culture of African-Americans and their African ancestors. She proudly told Augusta Baker when the manuscript began to assume its final form, “Now we are taking them [the stories] out of slavery.”28

  Margaret was in high spirits that summer of 1937 as she reported to Lucy Mitchell on her first Harlem trip. She was fairly bursting with other news as well. One day not long before, while observing a kitten playing by the hearth at Ploughed Fields, she had improvised a story about the cat—writing, as it were, from life, as Gertrude Stein was said to do when making her word portraits of her artist friends. She had also taken up the habit of composing impromptu verses about the paintings she saw on visits to New York museums, scribbling these on the backs of postcard reproductions. Another day, fishing off Long Island, she hauled in a “fish that our boatman . . . said had a ‘deep sea smile.’ “The winsome phrase, whether recalled or invented by her, had inspired a ballad of sorts, “The Fish With the Deep Sea Smile,” which became the title piece of her collection for Dutton:

  They fished and they fished

  Way down in the sea

  Down in the sea a mile

  They fished among all the fish in the sea

  For the fish with the deep sea smile . . .29

  Remembering with gratitude her teacher’s patient encouragement over the past two years, Margaret offered to dedicate The Fish with the Deep Sea Smile, still in progress, to Lucy Mitchell (“if,” she added with the gallantry of the Canterbury Knight, “you will accept it”).

  A new facility as a writer, one that nearly two years of Bank Street note taking and training had done much to cultivate, had become hers. When a royalty advance arrived from Harper in the form of a check made out to “Margaret Wise Brows,” she smiled with quiet satisfaction at the accidental caricature and confessed to Louise Raymond to feeling very flattered—though she trusted the error would not be repeated in print.30

  Later that summer, Margaret sailed for England, where she bought a bicycle and together with “some very chivalrous American boys I met on the boat” spent a week touring Cornwall. “This being of dubious convention,” she wrote Marguerite Hearsey, “is between us.”31 Her Chaucer was evidently standing her in good stead; for all this portion of her journey she felt like a “part of a pilgrimage, half prioresse half wife of Bath.” Pubs had been investigated. “It would have been only half of literature not to have gone in them.” The travelers had lodged at youth hostels, farms, and fisherman’s houses. In all, it had been “just beautiful.”

  Splitting off from the others, Margaret headed northeast through the Devonshire moors, through a fine rain with “nothing but rabbits, sheep, heather and the great waves of mist that blow up” all around her. “England is so like England should be that I have yet to feel real in it,” she told her old teacher. She was writing stories for the Dutton collection and painting landscapes as she travelled—to Oxford, then to London for a brief rest at stately Brown’s Hotel, then on to Canterbury, where the British leg of her self-styled pilgrimage came to an appropriate close. She met Roberta and Basil, who had come over to Europe on their belated honeymoon, in Paris. They all had planned to stay in the same modest Left Bank hotel, but Margaret had failed to write ahead to reserve her room. After much discussion, the concierge agreed to rent her one of the common bathrooms.

  The Paris Exposition was on, and Roberta and Basil had the most moving experience of their visit on viewing Picasso’s heroic new work of political protest, Guernica, large as a billboard, which compressed with the bluntness of a telegram horrific images of the slaughter and desolation of the Spanish Civil War. What Margaret may have thought of the painting is not known. The world situation was in any case not in her thoughts as she wrote her Harper editor, Louise Raymond, from Paris. She was spending time alone each day in one of the city’s open air markets, observing a certain white goose—”Josephine” Margaret called her—that came and went with equanimity and determination amid the looming human traffic.32 Cheering news arrived for her in Raymond’s next letter; Harper had received the first bound copies of When the Wind Blew, and they looked “perfectly stunning.”33

  In September, Margaret continued on to Ireland by herself, again touring by bicycle. In high spirits, she confided to Marguerite Hearsey, “I don’t know where I’m going . . . , but Time, the Lord and good taste will provide, I hope.”34 A few weeks later, a large clump of peat, unwrapped except for a heavy cord to which an address tag had been secured, arrived at 69 Bank Street—a bit of the old sod for her friends, with postage due, from “Brownie.”

  Feeling rested and renewed, Margaret returned to New York in October to begin the three-quarter-time job that she had persuaded Mitchell to offer her.35 She planned to devote every fourth week to writing plays; perhaps writing for the theater was the adult work she was really cut out for. (She was considering enrolling in a play-writing workshop at Columbia.) Or perhaps, as she told Miss Hearsey, she would simply dedicate the off-weeks to “playing and mankind—or both.” Her Bank Street salary of $110 a month would be supplemented by royalties and her allowance from home. In the previous year she had written a great deal of poetry. “But I am still too uncertain of what it is, to do more than put it away in a folder.” By one means or another, she said, she was determined to put children’s writing behind her, to “graduate,” as her friend Bruce Bliven, Jr., later described her ambition, to writing literature for adults.36

  Apparently it was not fear of her new-found success that prompted this acute longing for a different kind of literary career. On the contrary, Margaret was proud of all she had achieved. Reviews of When the Wind Blew, which began appearing in September, were uniformly favorable. The New York Times was typical in noting that “the musical flow and repetition of the text make it an admirable story for reading aloud.” The Horn Book also praised the musicality of Margaret’s prose.37 But to flourish within Bank Street’s rarefied precincts and gain acceptance within the still distinctly marginal domain of the book world known as juvenile publishing represented only a qualified success. Pioneering figure that Margaret was as a serious writer and as a poet of picture books for the nursery ages, she remained subject to periodic misgivings when family or friends poked fun at her for being the author of “baby books”—books of only fifty or a hundred small words intended for persons not yet old enough to read. And as Margaret’s Hollins friends continued to marry—in the Alumnae Quarterly’s class notes, her litanies of forthcoming books presented a striking contrast to the nuptial tidings—she could not help but wonder in her darker moments whether the gift that allowed her to write so knowingly for the very young did not harbor within it the curse of perpetual immaturity.

  Starting in October 1937, the dozen or so women of the Bank Street Writers Laboratory met on Wednesdays throughout the school year for late-afternoon sessions that generally stretched on into the evening. In a top-floor room with a battered green plush sofa as its centerpiece, Lucy Mitchell,
a stack of papers in hand, took her place each week in the sofa’s shapeless depths as the others gathered round. Mitchell rarely seemed in a hurry on these occasions, and for everyone in the group the meetings were eagerly anticipated.

  A heady, informal workshop atmosphere prevailed, with less rivalry among the participants than one might have expected from ambitious young writers routinely putting their work on the line for their fellows’ scrutiny. Lucy Mitchell’s fair-mindedness and contagious enthusiasm did much to set the cooperative spirit of the group. Sherry, tea, and delicious pastries also helped. When Margaret acquired a Kerry Blue terrier, she began bringing the dog to meetings. Curling up at her feet, Smoke often dozed through the literary discussions, but if a manuscript being read aloud happened to bore Margaret, a little kick to the dog’s ribs produced a mournful howl that spoke volumes for them both and gave the group as a whole a few tension-shattering moments of laughter.

  Because the members all had regular contact with young children, there were always fresh nuggets of “language data” to report. (“I come from Alabama,” a three-year-old had warbled into one researcher’s ear, “with a Band-aid on my knee.”)38 “The Emotional Effect of Stories on Children” and other prearranged discussion topics also provided a focus for a portion of some meetings.

  Distinguished guests periodically sat in—Pearl Buck, psychologist Alice Keliher, Max Lerner, poet and folklorist Sterling Brown, and many others. They commented on the members’ work and spoke about their own contributions to the fields of literature, child development, intelligence testing, and current affairs. Such encounters were considered an integral part of the here-and-now writer’s education. Talks by Margaret’s Harper editor, Louise Raymond, and by respected illustrators like Kurt Wiese kept the group grounded in the practical realities of writing for publication. The main business of each meeting, however, was the critiquing of work. The effectiveness of a particular image, the appropriateness of this or that word, and similar matters of craft were ardently debated as the group explored the central issue of how purely literary considerations and those brought to light by developmental research might be reconciled in the new kind of children’s literature.