Margaret Wise Brown Page 13

  Many of the public sculptures and murals flung up in all quarters of the fairgrounds struck the reporter as “dull and self-conscious in the Radio City style,” with their “big circus women with round contours and no clothes, holding an assortment of lightning bolts or a plowshare and representing, according to the legend, The World of Tomorrow, Freedom of Speech or The Way to the Ladies’ Room.” But he found other artworks admirable, as was the theory underlying their thoughtful integration within the fair’s overall scheme—that art could be fun, not just something to be “stared at with suspicious awe in galleries or public parks, but a comfortable, useful thing. . . . I shall be surprised . . . if this attitude as it is carried out here does not spill over into the building and decoration of tomorrow” (as in fact it did).

  With a few months still to go before the official opening ceremony in the spring of 1939, the sprawling international and industrial pavilions remained largely empty, unfinished outlines of the fair’s promised vision of “the World of Tomorrow.” Still, Bliven wrote, one could tell that the exposition had been conceived with an overall purpose in mind, that of “sing[ing] the praises and underscoring the possibilities of the democratic form of government. . . . Dictatorship has developed to a fine point the technique of singing its own praises”—as anyone knew who had viewed recent newsreel footage from abroad or scanned Life’s pages lately. “In a sense,” he concluded, with a prescient glance at things to come, “the World’s Fair is an experiment in the same art but for democracy.”

  In anticipation of the World’s Fair, New York public school children were being given a crash course in cross-cultural fellow-feeling. A story to this effect in the Herald Tribune—“Pupils to Learn Tolerance Here Twice a Month”—prompted the satirical poet Phyllis McGinley (afterwards also a Scott author) to marvel at the doubtful prospect of five- through eleven-year-olds quickly mastering an art and ethic that so consistently eluded their elders:

  To stretch their hands across the ocean;

  To open up their childish hearts

  And love their neighbor with devotion,

  As per the diagrams and charts;

  To call the foreigner their brother

  (Unless by chance he should endorse

  Some heretic opinion other

  Than that included in the Course).66

  The fair as a whole was meant as an expression of faith in a future world in which technological progress and advances in international understanding would proceed hand in hand. But it was impossible to overlook the lack of participation of one of Europe’s most powerful nations, Germany. Underlining the significance of Germany’s absence were horrifying front-page headlines of early November, chronicling the Nazi regime’s brutal Kristallnacht attacks on German Jewry after the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris.

  November of 1938 marked the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the armistice ending the Great War, a fact recalled with foreboding by educators and child development specialists as they met at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel and heard Yale psychologist Arnold Gesell assert that “only in a democracy can ‘full respect’ be given to the individuality of a child.”67 John Dewey had said as much a generation earlier, but set against the backdrop of the newly aggressive authoritarian regimes of Europe and the Far East, the idea carried renewed urgency. At a similar year-end conference held at Teachers College, Columbia University, education policymakers debated the proposition that the federal government, in order to assure an ample supply of talented national leaders for the dangerous times ahead, should establish a fund for the special education of children whose IQ scores indicated unusual promise.68

  At Scott’s office, meanwhile, work continued on Gertrude Stein’s manuscript. At the Bank Street nursery and elsewhere, Margaret read bits of the text to children of different ages and recorded the children’s comments in her sprawling longhand. A group of four-year-olds remarked:

  “The world is going around all the time right now very fast.”

  “And cars are going on it and cars always go to a house somewhere don’t they.”

  “Wild pigs are really bores [sic], wild bores.”69

  Children from three to thirteen accepted Stein’s fantasy on some level, the younger ones eagerly mimicking “noises . . . they said kangaroos made, a roar for a lion and a barking growl for a canarie [sic],” while a thoughtful thirteen-year-old praised the author for her ability to offer readers the “freedom to escape” in her story, as in a dream. Evidently, The World Is Round could not be tidily age-graded; Margaret was deeply impressed by the fact that Stein’s vibrant text resisted Bank Street categorization.70

  When many samples of children’s comments had been amassed, John McCullough, Bill Scott, and Margaret met to discuss possible revisions. McCullough, whose main roles in the company were those of financial overseer and congenial smoother of authors’ ruffled feathers, ventured an occasional opinion, but the major editorial debates were joined by Scott and Margaret, who “fought, bled and died over a comma,” as the latter recalled, in battles of wits and critical discernment that Margaret relished.71

  Stein’s punctuation, or (more often) the lack of it, was a particular concern. Children, it was agreed, needed more punctuation than did seasoned readers of the modernists. Margaret was assigned the task of reviewing the manuscript with this problem in mind, a turn of events she must have viewed with irony, considering her own undergraduate resistance to the comma, a literary rebellion Stein’s own writings had inspired. Intent on keeping a tight rein on the company’s dealings with Stein, it was McCullough, however, who wrote the author to ask whether she considered her punctuation final. Over the next several months, to Margaret’s disappointment, McCullough continued to brief Stein on pre-publication developments.

  Margaret’s own reputation as an author continued to grow. Writing in the Saturday Review of Literature in the fall of 1938, Louise Seaman Bechtel heralded The Streamlined Pig, published by Harper with illustrations by Kurt Wiese, as “one of the few really American picture books I have seen that has any charm. . . . Miss Brown . . . is an author and an editor to be watched with interest.”72 Two of the five Scott books that appeared that season were also written by Margaret, and though these were perhaps less widely reviewed, they nonetheless stood as further proof of her own accomplishments.

  Margaret’s personal life remained a good deal less settled. Her brother Gratz came to New York in late October to be married and returned with his bride to Flint, Michigan, where he was employed as an engineer by the A-C Spark Plug Company. Professional success had come early to Gratz. While still in his early twenties, he co-invented a combination air-cleaner and silencer which was soon in use in most automobiles of the time. Like father, like son; his work kept him on the road a good part of the time. In any case, he and Margaret had little to do with one another.

  The same was increasingly true of Margaret and Roberta. The two sisters had drifted apart since the time of their Swiss boarding-school days. Roberta’s marriage seems to have accelerated the process, even if she, Basil, and Margaret still occasionally socialized.

  The continuing decline of Robert and Maude Brown’s marriage completed the portrait of a family in ever-widening disarray, a reality which filled Margaret with a sense of desolation. As Christmas approached she found herself alone and was greatly relieved when Dorothy Wagstaff, who was away at boarding school in Aiken, South Carolina, invited her to spend the holidays there. Traveling south by train, Margaret tried her best to put punctuation, family, and New York bustle out of her mind, at least for the moment.

  Chapter Four

  Everywhere and Somewhere

  Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was. And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell . . . all about themselves.

  GERTRUDE STEIN,

  The World Is Round

 
The late 1930s, the time of Margaret’s professional coming of age, was among the most dynamic periods in the history of American children’s book publishing. The emergence of a small, feisty, independent-minded house like Scott was but one indication of the astonishing vitality of the field. Older firms, which had cut back or eliminated their juveniles departments during the first years of the Depression, had by the mid-1930s begun to show signs of renewed commitment. Children’s departments that had proven their worth during the prosperous 1920s, in financial as well as literary and artistic terms, were once again in a position to do so. Moreover, the prejudice against “baby books” which wore so heavily at times on Margaret and others in the field now yielded unexpected dividends.

  Because the executives in charge of the major houses had little or no interest in juveniles, they generally left their department heads to their own devices, to publish what they liked. Gifted editors, notably Viking’s May Massee and (from 1940) Ursula Nordstrom at Harper, seized the initiative, publishing an astonishing array of books which were to last. The year 1939 alone saw the publication of Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Hardie Gramatky’s Little Toot, and Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline. Artists like Gramatky, who had worked for Disney, and Bemelmans, who had come to New York from abroad, contributed to the exceptionally fertile creative environment within which Margaret was fast becoming a figure of importance. In 1938, children’s book illustrators had even gotten their own award, the Caldecott Medal, given annually thereafter by the American Library Association for the most distinguished work of illustration first published in the United States within the past year. (The Newbery Medal, the ALA’s prize for writers, had been established in 1921.) When Margaret returned to work after the long holidays in January of 1939, it was to an office and a corner of the book world overflowing with a sense of possibility.

  Gertrude Stein, it turned out, had rather definite ideas about the illustration and design of her first fantasy for children; Scott and McCullough soon found themselves back in potentially treacherous waters. For one thing, Stein was eager to have a British artist protégé of hers, one Sir Francis Rose, as her illustrator, but Bill Scott, after seeing sample drawings by Rose, was unwilling to accept her choice. Conveying this news to Stein in a letter dated February 8, John McCullough offered an uncharacteristically garbled critique that betrayed his trepidation. The “rather studied decadence and sophistication” of Rose’s style, he wrote, “though possessing qualities of its own strikes me as neither appealing to children nor particularly appropriate to the imaginative vitality of your writing.”1

  Sir Francis was to have been the book’s “third rose”; Rose was the name of the story’s heroine, and the author had specified that The World Is Round be printed on rose-colored paper with the text printed in blue, the imaginary girl’s favorite color.

  Problems posed by Stein’s unorthodox color scheme were already putting Bill Scott’s considerable ingenuity as a printer to the test. In the same letter to Stein, McCullough, finding his stride, noted, “We are having a terrific time locating a Rose colored paper that is possible. Next time we hope you will name your heroine Peach or preferably Snow White.”

  By early February several New York illustrators, having heard of the Stein manuscript, had applied for the assignment. As a courtesy to the author, McCullough sent samples of their work to France for her consideration. Whoever arranged for the shipping of the parcel failed to prepay the customs duty, as had been promised, and when Stein learned of this she insisted on inspecting the package’s contents at the customs house before deciding whether or not to accept it. Accordingly, she examined the various sketches and then informed the clerk she did not wish to pay. Soon afterward, Stein wrote McCullough that she agreed to his first choice. Clement Hurd would illustrate The World Is Round.2

  Among the other contenders for the job had been Leonard Weisgard, a tall, owlish-looking twenty-three-year-old commercial artist. When Margaret first met him for an interview, Weisgard, a former dancer and Macy’s window dresser, had one published children’s book to his credit and was much in demand as a magazine illustrator. The New Yorker cover for the week in which Stein’s manuscript reached Scott’s office the previous November had featured a Weisgard painting of a fashionable apartment interior superimposed on a page of real estate ads. The contemporary look of his designs, which owed something to Russian Constructivism, McKnight Kauffer’s modernist graphics, and Stuart Davis’s cubist phase, impressed Margaret as a welcome alternative to the wistful sentimentality of a great deal of children’s book art—the “strawberries and cream school” of illustration, as she and Weisgard took to calling it.3

  Margaret and the illustrator found that despite differences of background (Weisgard was a shopkeeper’s son) they had much in common. His chief ambition, he confided to her, was to become a painter, a goal that paralleled Margaret’s own dream of writing for adults. Like her, he had never been a good student; he had dropped out of Pratt Institute in order to paint on his own, and his commercial work was his means of support. But also like Margaret, he was a voracious reader with highly eclectic tastes; they had both, it turned out, read with great interest Julian Huxley’s recent Animal Language, a study of animal sounds as communication. Margaret promised at their first meeting that whatever the outcome of the competition to illustrate The World Is Round, she would find some project for Weisgard at Scott. Following her well-established pattern, she proceeded in a few hours’ time to produce for him the first draft of an ingenious piece of here-and-now-world-is-round mischief. Partly inspired by their shared enthusiasm for Animal Language, Margaret’s first collaboration with Weisgard was The Noisy Book.

  Published along with The World Is Round on Scott’s fall 1939 list, The Noisy Book invited readers to imitate, as loudly as they wished, the sounds of horses, trucks, dogs, and jackhammers. Grown-ups could not recite the text without entering into the game—or else appearing stilted.

  The story concerns a young dog named Muffin who, having gotten a cinder in his eye, has his eyes temporarily bandaged and is left to rely on his hearing:

  “Poor little Muffin,” said the people in the street.

  “Muffin has a big white bandage over his eyes and can’t see a thing.”

  But Muffin could hear. . . .

  MEN HAMMERING

  Bang bang bang . . .

  Bzzzzzz bzzzzzz

  a bee . . . 4

  Another impetus for The Noisy Book was a Symbolist-related speculation of Weisgard’s that sounds might be translated into visual equivalents through the colors and shapes of an illustration. Margaret had also remembered a Writers Laboratory experiment in which Lucy Mitchell had sent her and her colleagues outdoors to stand beside a city lamppost with their eyes closed, the better to listen to their environment with the clear-headed receptivity of toddlers. From Margaret, the ear-to-the-ground Bank Street researcher, had come Muffin, the “Noisy” dog.

  Margaret, moreover, was no longer fearful of being overwhelmed by the influence of Gertrude Stein’s voluble style. In The Noisy Book she took on some of the expatriate writer’s rhetorical swagger.

  And then there was Rose.

  Rose was her name and would she have been Rose if her name had not been Rose. She used to think and then she used to think again.5

  That was Stein in The World Is Round. And this was Margaret:

  Then the sun began to shine

  Could Muffin hear that . . .

  HORSES HOOFS

  Clop clop Clop clop

  Flippity flap flap flap

  an awning in the wind

  It began to snow

  But could Muffin hear that?

  As Scott gave Margaret more or less free rein in the acquisition of manuscripts, she could afterwards say with little exaggeration, “I submitted it, and we”—Margaret again—“accepted it.”6

  Since Leonard Weisgard was to draw a dog, Margaret without consulting him presented the artist with a live m
odel. The black mongrel pup was half Kerry Blue (the father was Smoke) and half standard poodle (the mother was a prize-winning dog belonging to Bill Gaston). Weisgard lived in midtown Manhattan in fairly sumptuous quarters at the Hotel Gotham, an elegant beaux-arts establishment known for its excellent dining room and European clientele. To placate (successfully) an elderly Irishwoman living across the hall from him, who might otherwise have insisted that the dog be removed, Weisgard named the puppy Finnegan. The artist’s new charge proved a good bit less tractable, urinating on several Noisy Book paintings Weisgard had left out to dry. (Fortunately, he worked rapidly from already fully formed mental images and the illustrations were soon redone.)

  Weisgard faced other difficulties. At Bank Street, the nursery school children who previewed his illustrations balked at the artist’s stylized way of rendering truck wheels—they complained that eggs were oval, but wheels were round. Weisgard was obliged to redo the wheels. Margaret came in for criticism as well. The children told her that car horns did not go “honk honk,” as she had written in her first draft, but “awuurra awuurra.” Margaret accepted this revision as the improvement that it was. She had considerably less respect, however, for the comments of a Bank Street colleague to whom she also presented the manuscript. A staff psychologist reported back that a story about a little male dog whose eyes were completely bandaged over could suggest only one thing—castration!—to a young male reader. The psychologist urged the author to abandon the project. Bristling at criticism she considered nonsensical, Margaret lost no time on account of it.

  As part of his initiation into the Bank Street–Scott method of testing books, Leonard Weisgard sometimes accompanied Margaret during the numerous trial readings she conducted of The World Is Round. He was standing watch one day in the Bank Street nursery, serving as a second set of eyes and ears, as she read to a group of eight seasoned three-year-olds seated in a circle in brightly colored chairs. The children listened intently to the passage about Willie and his pet lion: “Willie went with his father to a little place where they sold wild animals. If the world is round can wild animals come out of the ground.”7