Margaret Wise Brown Read online

  “No!” shouted the children as though (Margaret observed) they thought the question addressed directly to them.8 Many such sessions were held with children of different ages. Passages that provoked confused looks or restless behavior were duly noted, and when the galleys went out to Stein on March 23, they were accompanied by forty single-spaced typed pages of “suggested” minor revisions, most concerning the placement of commas. The lion’s share of the effort had been Margaret’s, as she proudly reported to the Hollins Alumnae Quarterly. She had, she wrote, lately been hard at work “wrestling with Gertrude Stein’s lack of punctuation and Governor [William] Bradford’s superflueity [sic] of punctuation in his journal of the Pilgrim Landing.” (The latter reference is to Homes in the Wilderness, also published by Scott in the fall of 1939, presenting original source material about life at Plymouth Colony.) In her report, Margaret recounted the circumstances that had led up to her becoming the famed expatriate’s editor, adding heartily, “I shouldn’t be surprised but that we may have a wonderful book.”9

  Any publishing house would have considered it a great coup to have Gertrude Stein’s first juvenile on their upcoming list, and at Scott anticipation was running high. The firm hired an advertising consultant, Joseph Ryle, to handle the publicity. Nursery wallpaper and decorative hooked rugs based on the book’s illustrations were planned. There would be window displays along Fifth Avenue, and hundreds of review copies, far more than the usual number for Scott, were to be distributed to newspapers and magazines across the country. But if Margaret could take satisfaction in the dramatic events unfolding around her as a direct consequence of her editorial enterprise, her delight was marred by the fact that Stein herself remained virtually unaware of Margaret’s pivotal role.

  The note of recognition that did come Margaret’s way that spring of 1939 was of an altogether different nature. On Sunday, April 16, her name and photograph appeared in the New York papers announcing her as the winner of a grueling cross-country footrace, the final event of her Long Island hunting club’s spring season. Margaret took care to preserve the clippings—including one from the Herald Tribunes society page ironically headlined “The Strenuous Life”—in a scrapbook that she showed proudly to friends. In honor of the occasion, John McCullough, with whom she remained on genial terms despite her frustrations over the Stein project, composed a commemorative poem that was also a parody of The World Is Round. Stein’s book contained the passage: “I am Rose my eyes are blue / I am Rose and who are you / I am Rose and when I sing / I am Rose like anything.”10 This McCullough recast to read: “I am Margaret and my Wise are Brown / I am Margaret and how’s your hown / I am Margaret and when I beagle / My picture gets into the Brooklyn Eagle.”11

  In May it was McCullough, not Margaret, who wrote Stein to say that steady progress had been made: “We are now working on a circular circular that should add to the rotundity of the world.”12 And in June, when the first proof pages came off the press, it was he who informed her that trouble had arisen at the printer: “My graphic minded partner [Scott] is in dark clouds of grief that there is quite a bit of color variation from page to page.” Unable to find a suitable rose-colored paper, they had decided to tint standard white paper. “To my mind,” he reassured Stein, “this variation is unexpectedly pleasing but I dare not express such heresy in his presence.”13 McCullough went on to relay a sampling of the comments gathered (if not by Margaret herself, under her supervision) from children. A twelve-year-old Long Island girl had said: “This would be an interesting story if written in everyday language. It could, to my mind, be built up to be a very good kind of story, perhaps if an entirely different story were used.” Another young critic had faulted the author for her odd habit of repeating herself.

  McCullough reported these comments for the author’s amusement. The overwhelming response of children, McCullough wrote, had been exceedingly favorable. For his part, he had already declared The World Is Round a masterpiece. “We hope,” he had written Stein the previous November, “that reaction to this book will tempt you to write us another.”14

  On June 24, 1939, just days before The World Is Round went to press, Edith Thacher and Clement Hurd were married on Cape Cod. Stein had written her collaborator to thank him for his efforts (“I am awfully really awfully pleased”), to which Hurd replied that her message had made “a delightful wedding present.”15 By July 12, the couple were back in New York so the artist could oversee the unusually difficult printing job Stein’s book entailed. The newlyweds then returned north for a belated honeymoon at the North Ferrisburg, Vermont, farm where they planned to live for a part of each year.

  Margaret spent the summer at Long Cove on Vinalhaven, in the same house as the year before. This time, however, she rented it alone. Much to her disappointment, Bill Gaston had remarried. Ensconced with his new bride on his private island just across the bay from Long Cove, he cavalierly dispatched his nine-year-old son Jimmy to run errands for her, while continuing to flirt with Margaret in a manner that left her in a state of turmoil. Illustrators from New York and other friends came and went over the summer as Margaret attempted to work and “regenerate,” and was forcibly reminded once again of the painful confusion of her private life.

  Back in New York the following fall, she took Leonard Weisgard increasingly into her confidence. Like Margaret, Weisgard was a good listener. He shared her enjoyment of extravagant living (and spending) and was generally willing to indulge her occasional patches of brooding self-absorption. On days when she “felt rich,” as she would say, they might go for elaborate meals at La Crémaillère, an elegant rooftop restaurant with a view of Central Park, or to Aux Gais Penguins (another fashionable uptown French eatery) or downtown to Pappa Monetta’s, at 32 Mulberry Street, a rustic establishment with fine northern Italian cuisine.16

  To feel rich, Weisgard needed only a slight upturn in his bank balance. But for Margaret, because she generally had enough of it, money had little to do with her notion of personal wealth. When she telephoned to say, “Leonard, I am so poor this week,” what she usually meant was that she had not written a satisfactory story or poem in the last day or two, or that she was harboring again the recurring suspicion that writing for children was not serious work.

  Margaret and Leonard often met for breakfast at Longchamps, a Greenwich Village restaurant and outdoor café with “smart” atmosphere, and they went for long walks through the city, wandering in and out of Third Avenue antique shops and Manhattan’s sixty-odd art galleries, through flower and vegetable markets and Central Park. Both were restless, brisk walkers, but in midtown Manhattan they often slowed down to study the Fifth Avenue shop window displays, which during the late thirties burst with an exuberant artistry rivalling the most sophisticated design work in Harper’s Bazaar, on Balasco’s Broadway, or in the stark new galleries of the Museum of Modern Art.

  Fifth Avenue—the “street of dreams” of Irwin Shaw’s bittersweet New Yorker stories about lost and found romance in the imperial city—afforded passing glimpses of the good life. “Look at those dresses,” a typical Shaw window-shopper sighed. “It’s nice to know things like that exist.”17 As though to resurrect, or at least refurbish, the American dream of prosperity after years of economic hard times, the city’s fashion windows had become elaborately staged fantasy sets; larger-than-life mannequins, the un-blinking stars of the drama, no longer stared down their haughty noses at passersby, as their forebears of the teens and twenties had done, but seemed to wink at them, inviting all to join the party.

  Mannequins rode on ski lifts; mannequins sipped tall, cool drinks. At Saks Fifth Avenue, a mannequin-patient on an analyst’s couch suffered from an obsession, visualized overhead, concerning a costly dress the store happened to be featuring. Perhaps, as Elsa Schiapparelli (whose extravagantly ticketed creations were achieving a high peak of fashionableness) said, life was “a-musing” in the fall of 1939, even if the Depression had not quite ended for everyone and England and France were at
war with Germany. For Margaret and her collaborator, the elegant mid-town displays were like outsized picture books lining the avenue.

  During their walks around town, Margaret often had occasion to greet some passing friend her companion had never seen before. Such occasions were forcible reminders to Weisgard that much remained hidden about the fascinating woman who so freely took him into her confidence at times. Once, in front of Rockefeller Center, a well-dressed bear of a man with short-cropped hair and a beefy complexion caught her eye, warmly embraced her, and chatted privately with her for a moment before continuing on his way.

  “Oh, that was Irwin Shaw,” she said remotely, leaving her ever-discreet friend to wonder how she happened to know Shaw (then the most lionized of New York’s younger writers) and what the precise nature of their relationship might be.18

  Margaret did introduce Weisgard to the Hurds, and the three liked each other from the start. Not long after their first meeting, the two illustrators enrolled together in an advanced design course taught by Harper’s Bazaars renowned art director, Alexey Brodovich, at the New School. They also shared a serious interest as collectors of American folk art, the abstract and primitive qualities of which had come to represent to a small but expanding group within the art world of the twenties and thirties a sort of prologue to modernism, an historical precedent for expressing artistic truth outside the bounds of traditional realism.

  In the way of New York friendships, Weisgard and the Hurds actually saw each other only occasionally. Their common thread was their connection to Margaret, and when she herself was not around her colorful doings and remarks provided inexhaustible material for conversation. They were all three deeply fond of her, and few people spent more time with her over the years, but one reason that Leonard, Clem, and Posey enjoyed getting together as a threesome was their unspoken mutual conviction that some member of the group—each assumed it was one of the others—must be the one person who really knew the elusive Margaret best.

  Among the artists who called on Margaret at Scott in the fall of 1939 was Charles Shaw, a tall, robust, dapper man in his late forties. An accomplished polymath, Shaw was a writer, painter, collector, and man about town, a boyish enthusiast with a sizeable inheritance to bankroll his enthusiasms. A classmate of Cole Porter’s at Yale, Shaw worked as a journalist for a time, contributing to the Bookman, Town & Country, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. A reserved but witty man, he not only belonged to the “smart set”—Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Jean Nathan, and Monty Wooley were among his friends over the years—he wrote the book on the subject, Nightlife: Vanity Fair’s Intimate Guide to New York After Dark.

  While living for a few years in London and Paris, Charles Shaw had also begun to paint. Back in New York, in 1936 he became a charter member of the American Abstract Artists, the pioneering group of nonobjective painters that included Ilya Bolotowsky, Balcomb Greene, and Esphyr Slobodkina. Among the AAA’s underlying convictions was the belief that because colors, shapes, and visual patterns are recognizable to all people, geometric abstraction held enormous potential as the basis for a new and highly accessible popular art. It was only a short step from that idea to thoughts of employing the lingua franca of abstract art in illustration for the young.19

  Shaw was also a collector of Lewis Carroll first editions (as well as tarot cards, horse brasses, old English police truncheons, carved wooden tobacco figures, and scrimshaw). Always a figure of grand scope and ambition, he seems to have decided, some time in 1938 or 1939, to see whether he had it within himself to become a new Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. Shaw composed some fantasy tales, began making the rounds of publishers, and after months of the usual rejections was directed to the firm of William R. Scott, Inc. It was suggested to him that Scott’s editor might be interested in his type of work and that Scott had “lots of money behind them”— the implication being that even a book that seemed likely to lie dead in the water from a sales point of view might have a chance there if it had sufficient merit.20

  Buoyed by this slender and, as it turned out, not altogether accurate bit of intelligence, Shaw, on a fine fall morning, dropped off one of his manuscripts for “Miss M. W. Brown” at her 69 Bank Street office.21 The editor’s initial response, by letter, was neither a definite yes or no, and on November 9, several notes and phone calls later, he and Margaret finally met for a talk which the artist, in his diary, judged “quite satisfactory.”22 The meeting inspired Shaw to write another story, “Jumble Pie,” which Margaret told him fell into the crack between adult and children’s fantasy and yet seemed “too good to turn down.”23 She continued to offer him a mixture of encouragement and direction which spurred Shaw on until she was at last able to accept a manuscript of his, The Giant of Central Park, the following spring of 1940.

  Gradually, the formal manner of their early meetings gave way to a comfortable sort of mutual regard. A facile conversationalist with endless tales to tell of Gotham, “old London towne,” and the art world, Shaw was also a deeply loyal and considerate friend. In time, he became one of Margaret’s chief confidants.

  That fall of 1939, the main focus of attention at Scott was on how The World Is Round would be received. Reviews began appearing in late September, and a great many of them were good, though there was hardly a critic in America, it seemed, who could resist putting an ironical twist on praise for the idiosyncratic expatriate’s first work for juveniles.

  Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Ellen Lewis Buell allowed that “for a skeptic who never quite finished the first paragraph of ‘Tender Buttons’ it is a pleasant duty to report that Miss Stein seems to have found her audience.” Warming to her subject, she asserted:

  Miss Stein has caught within this architectural structure of words which rhyme and rhyme again the essence of certain moods of childhood: the first exploration of one’s own personality, the feeling of lostness in a world of night skies and mountain peaks, sudden unreasoning emotions and impulses, the preoccupation with vagrant impressions of little things filtering through the mind. . . . It will . . . probably be the most quotable book of the season.24

  Writing in Books, another critic observed that while Stein’s story was printed on paper of an “awful color, . . . every small child will think it lovely. It is the color once given toothpaste to induce children to brush their teeth, and it worked.”25 The New Republic ventured a cautious comparison with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the Horn Book, Louise Seaman Bechtel unequivocally declared, “Here is a new book that is a new kind of book, and I like it very much.”26 Among the least admiring of Stein’s reviewer’s, the New Yorkers Katharine S. White, found the author’s “flashes of wit” and “moments of poetry and imagination . . . so buried in tedious mannerisms and lumbering whimsy” that she doubted the excavation work required was worth the effort.27 Others resorted to parody: “Gertrude Stein is writing is writing is writing a new Gertrude Stein a new book is writing is writing Gertrude a new a new a new . . .”28

  Certainly the most surprising review was by Anne Carroll Moore, who a year earlier had summarily dismissed Scott’s first list as subliterary. Writing in her “Three Owls” column in the Horn Book, Moore, after noting her “unfavorable reaction to the smell of the book,” grudgingly conceded that The World Is Round was “genuine child stuff” that “holds joy for many readers. . . . We have need of gaiety and a return to childhood in these grave days.”29

  By the first of the year it was clear that The World Is Round had not been the financial success that both the publisher and author hoped for. Library sales were respectable, but retail demand fell far short of expectations. There were few takers for world-is-round decorative hooked rugs and wallpaper. Bill Scott consigned the unsold heap of rose-and-blue books to long-term storage in his Vermont barn.

  Margaret and Leonard Weisgard’s collaboration, The Noisy Book, had meanwhile become Scott’s bestseller. Across the country, parents, progressive school teachers and presumably even some l
ibrarians were “tick-tick”-ing like clocks, “siss-sisssss”-ing like radiators and growling like empty stomachs, to the rapturous approval of three-, four-, and five-year-olds who, chiming in, “chirp-chirp”-ed like birds or were stopped short on being asked, “Then the sun began to shine. Could Muffin hear that?” By year’s end, Margaret could contemplate her first large (by Scott’s modest standards) popular success with the sanguine sense of having outfoxed everyone.

  In January of 1940, having resolved to take certain matters into her own hands, Margaret wrote her first letter to Gertrude Stein: “It seems high time to come from behind the scenes and tell you how among all people I think I enjoy and delight in your book the most.”30 It was a lopsided declaration that doubtless betrayed her frustration at having been kept “behind the scenes” until then. Regaining her composure, Margaret recalled the young listeners who had also eagerly embraced Stein’s fantasy, like the five-year-old who had told his grandmother, “I don’t like it. Go on!” and refused to let her stop reading the book aloud.

  In her letter, Margaret wove a starstruck tale of admiration for the author’s innovative work, of having attended her Brooklyn Academy lecture and posted a bet with McCullough over their letter to her. “I never dreamed that you would really write the way things happen in children’s heads. No one has ever remembered so well . . . before.”

  It is not known whether Stein replied to Margaret’s overture. In all likelihood she did not, but Margaret longed for some contact with a mentor-like figure from the larger literary world. She had outgrown the genteel Miss Hearsey, and was close to having learned all she could from Lucy Mitchell.