Margaret Wise Brown Read online

  Among Margaret’s own writing projects just then was an outline for a magazine article that she hoped might gain her a foothold in the adult publishing world. “New York: The Melting Pot of Good Cuisine” was to consist of an international culinary guide to Manhattan, a sort of world tour for adventuresome diners. Margaret planned to have Leonard Weisgard design a festive map; she would supply pithy notations around the margins. She intended to present the idea to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

  An early draft of the proposal proclaimed:

  The Map of the World may change overnight and then change again next week. But the boundaries of good cuisine are more steadfast. . . . Dine every evening in a different country, the sound of foreign languages in your ears. Drink honey wines and mountain ash cordials from Poland, eat green salads from France, arroz con pollo from Spain, Scandinavian smorgasbord, Russian baclava, zabaglione from Italy, English mutton chops and ale, rose leaves from Turkey for dessert. . . . Down below Washington Square the water is boiling and they are about to throw three miles of spaghetti into a pot.31

  The airy sophistication of high gloss fashion writing did not come easily to her, but the idea was engaging and Vogue expressed tentative interest. Margaret’s timing, however, could not have been less fortunate. The worsening international situation lent a certain air of unreality to “The Melting Pot” and its incitements to eat, drink, and be merry. In the early weeks of 1940, with much of Europe at war and with the increasing likelihood that the conflict would spread worldwide, Vogue reconsidered and Margaret shelved the project.32

  Meanwhile she and Scott quarreled over the terms of payment for her editorial services. Scott proposed to replace a generous earlier agreement to pay “editorial royalties” on books she oversaw with a more conventional annual flat fee to be set without regard to the profitability of the various titles. Suspecting she was being taken advantage of, Margaret accused Scott of trying to save money at her expense. For his part, the publisher insisted his motive was to establish the company’s list on a sound financial basis. The incident was revealing of changes on both sides. Scott, who had run the firm in the beginning as a sort of elaborate family outing, was learning to manage his company in a more businesslike way. Margaret, who in the early days probably would have worked as a volunteer, was forming a clearer sense of her own professional worth. As both she and Scott viewed money in largely symbolic terms, they stubbornly refused to compromise. The publisher formalized his new offer in a letter to her dated April 22. In a moment of rage followed by a moment of something like calm reflection, Margaret tore the letter to shreds and then gathered up the pieces, placing them in an envelope marked “Broken Contract.”33 In one month and a day, she would turn thirty.

  Except at William R. Scott, Inc., where John McCullough and Bill Scott took an active hand in editorial matters, virtually all American children’s book editors of the 1930s and 1940s were women. At the larger houses, such editorships ranked at or very near the bottom of the ladder in power and prestige. Women accepted these posts partly because it was supposed that in some vaguely understood but important way, editing “juveniles” was a natural extension of a woman’s role as mother. They also took these jobs, however, because they had little hope of advancing elsewhere in the profession. It was true that during the prosperous twenties, the juveniles editors at major firms like Macmillan and Doubleday had gained a measure of respect from management because they not only turned profits for their houses but also transformed their departments into unofficial laboratories of innovative book design and production. But even in the best of times, men had not wanted to edit “baby books.” During the Depression and afterwards the pattern continued.

  Most women who entered the field were “career women” who never married and who remained at their jobs for twenty or thirty years or more. Margaret’s Harper editor, Louise Raymond, was atypical; for a time she had combined married life and work. Then, at the close of 1939, in anticipation of the birth of her first child, Raymond resigned, leaving her capable young assistant, Ursula Nordstrom, in charge. In their first face-to-face encounter, Anne Carroll Moore pointedly questioned the new Harper editor about her credentials; Nordstrom, who (as her interrogator meant to remind her) had never worked as a librarian, evenly replied; “I am a former child.”34 Margaret’s and Nordstrom’s mutual antipathy to Moore was one of the shared sentiments that got them off to a solid start.

  Born in Manhattan in 1910, the daughter of the well-known Broadway stage actor Henry E. Dixie and actress Marie Nordstrom, Ursula Nordstrom spent her childhood at boarding schools, where she developed a keen sense of personal independence. As a young person she already possessed a strong capacity for empathizing with outsiders, and when the Depression dimmed her chances of going to college, she decided to look for a job as a social worker assigned to delinquent children. No opportunity of this kind materialized, however, and she eventually arrived at the offices of Harper and Brothers, “Publishers Since 1817,” where she was hired as Louise Raymond’s assistant.

  An expansive, full-hearted, Hogarthian personality (years later, signing a note to one of her illustrators, she would claim that it was she who had been “Est. 1817”),35 Nordstrom became Harper’s editor just as Margaret’s reputation as a writer was becoming secure. That Margaret herself continued to be plagued by periodic doubts as to the value of her work was another matter; it was among Nordstrom’s chief assets as an editor that she generally had meaningful words of encouragement for Margaret, as she did for her other authors and artists, and she was able to make them all feel quite literally at home. Margaret rapidly accumulated a raft of Harper contracts. She and Nordstrom also happened to be neighbors, and they often met informally over breakfast at Longchamps, where Margaret typically arrived with Smoke on one hand and a manila envelope containing her current inventory of poems and stories in the other.

  In the spring of 1940 Leonard Weisgard and the Hurds were also feeling their oats professionally. Weisgard, in addition to his magazine work, had lined up several picture book contracts and had begun to realize that he would always have as much illustration work as he wished. That same spring, Clement Hurd mounted his first one-man show of paintings in New York. The likely choice to illustrate any new children’s manuscript that Gertrude Stein might have in the offing, Hurd had found, in Margaret and his own wife, two prolific long-term collaborators. The larger publishing houses, moreover, had begun to show interest in him and Posey. It was mostly out of a sense of personal loyalty that in early 1940 the illustrator submitted a new project to Scott, whose terms were bound to be less favorable than those offered elsewhere. The Race was the first book Hurd had written as well as illustrated. When Bill Scott offered to publish it only if the artist was willing to make substantial revisions, Hurd asked if he might try his luck with another firm. Scott, doubtless sensing that the first phase of his company’s life, the ebullient time of inspired amateur-friends, was fast coming to a close, agreed to release the manuscript, which Random House promptly accepted in its original form.

  Margaret, for her part, resumed outwardly friendly relations with Scott and continued to edit books for the company, though her disenchantment with her situation there steadily grew. From then onward, she offered fewer of her own manuscripts to Scott.

  Margaret was known as “Brownie” to her colleagues at Scott, after the Bank Street pattern. But at Harper, Ursula Nordstrom teased (and flattered) her with “Miss Genius” and “My Favorite Author.” Margaret in turn prodded John McCullough by referring to Nordstrom in conversation as her “Second Favorite Editor,” leaving McCullough to wonder whether she considered him—or herself—her favorite.36 The merest reference to Harper, which as a larger house was in a good position to win over Margaret’s services from Scott, was not lost on him. Soon other publishers were also vying for her loyalty.

  Among the growing circle of Margaret’s acquaintances in 1940 was Bennett Cerf, president of Random House. A gregarious bachelor and inveterate
party-goer, Cerf, then forty-two, was bound to meet an attractive writer like Margaret. They spent an occasional evening together with mutual friends (Bruce Bliven, Jr., among others) and in May arranged a luncheon meeting with Bill Scott and Random House’s juveniles editor, Louise Bonino, to talk shop.

  Scott’s very small and specialized firm and Cerf’s rapidly expanding general trade house epitomized opposite ends of the publishing spectrum. Cerf knew little about the juveniles side of publishing but clearly recognized its commercial potential. With Random House’s purchase of Smith and Haas in 1936, he had acquired the American rights to Jean de Brunhoff’s Story of Babar. The great popularity of the Random House edition of de Brun-hoff’s robust and very French picture book (and its sequels) piqued the publisher’s curiosity about the field, though with only one other notable exception—the work of Theodor Geisel, “Dr. Seuss”—he left his firm’s juveniles trade to others. Geisel’s clever, jokey word play was close to Cerf’s own sense of humor, but the publisher had little appreciation for the seemingly simple poetry of Margaret’s type of writing. With more wit than tact he repeatedly poked fun at her by referring to her “baby books.”37

  Margaret and Cerf shared an interest in the work of Gertrude Stein—“Gerty” the latter called her. Random House and William R. Scott were just then Stein’s most active American publishers, a fact not likely to have been overlooked at lunch, especially as the expatriate author had lately been contemplating a second lecture tour of the United States and had sought John McCullough’s advice in the selection of a booking agent.

  Stein hoped, she said, to be back in New York before the end of spring. As the publishers met, however, she remained in France, distracting herself from the alarming news of the German military advance by composing a second children’s fantasy, “To do: a book of alphabets and birthdays.”38 Her travel plans were in suspension, and with the German invasion of France in June of 1940, all thoughts of a new tour would be abandoned.

  It was most likely in the spring or early summer of 1940 that Margaret met Michael Strange, the flamboyant socialite, actress, and author who had achieved a certain celebrity during the 1920s as the wife of John Barrymore. (Michael Strange was her chosen pen and stage name; she was originally Blanche Oelrichs of Newport.) She had divorced Barrymore and was presently married to a prominent attorney, Harrison Tweed. It was Tweed, apparently, who first made Margaret’s acquaintance at a party and invited her for cocktails at the couple’s apartment at 10 Gracie Square, overlooking the East River.

  The two women, it turned out, had several mutual friends. Bill Gaston had known Michael Strange since the twenties, when she and John Barrymore had visited Gaston’s Maine island retreat. Charles Shaw, who had served in the Army Air Service with Strange’s favorite cousin, Hermann Oelrichs, had written a New Yorker profile of her. Clement Hurd had known her eldest son, Leonard Thomas, Jr., first at Yale and then in Paris. (On Hurd’s return to New York in 1933, it was Thomas who invited him to the gala evenings at 10 Gracie Square.) Joseph Ryle, the advertising consultant hired by Scott to promote The World Is Round, was another of the attractive young men that Michael Strange always had in attendance on such occasions, much to the exasperation, it may be assumed, of her husband. Members of the Buckram Beagles were, like her, also members of New York’s exclusive Colony Club and were likely to cross paths with her during the year at any number of other society points of rendezvous in New York, Palm Beach, Bar Harbor, London, Biarritz, Paris, and elsewhere. It was all but inevitable that Margaret and Michael Strange would meet sooner or later.

  Their relationship, as it evolved, was to become one of the most intense and eventually most painfully difficult experiences of Margaret’s life. It began, however, with great expectations, as another of the many positive efforts she was making at the time to lift herself into the larger world of literary accomplishment and mature, impassioned living.

  Margaret chronicled the beginnings of this friendship in a series of undated, unpublished short stories, including one called “The Scent,” in which she recorded her first impressions of Michael Strange and suggested what each of the two might have meant to the other at the time of their first meeting.39

  “The Scent” concerns a young woman named Carrie who looks up to a beautiful, glamorous friend twenty years older than herself. “If,” Carrie considers, “to grow older were to become like this woman [Alison] her faith in growing old was restored.” There is a sureness about Alison that is a matter not just of taste but of temperament: “The older woman had . . . what is most exciting in the same sex—Glamor. For Alison was famous and had lived a discreet and lusty life with her three husbands and her writing. And over all a discretion that made her a woman of her times rather than a mere bohemian.”

  When the two fictional friends get together—“at least twice a week which is very often in New York”—they talk about marriage, men, and about Alison’s affairs. “You knew she had lovers and she would tell you about some of them. But she never mentioned any names. That was the difference between her own generation and Alison’s Carrie thought. They went around as much as anyone but just had the sense to be discreet about it.”

  If to Carrie, Alison represents an ideal of modern womanhood and worldly sophistication, Alison sees in Carrie an uncanny reflection of herself at an earlier age: “So I sat with the same gravity, the same gayety [sic] when I laughed twenty years ago, the same anxious longing to live and not be too hurt by it.” Carrie has “a quality of wonder about her, a way of brooding with her lips half parted” that also reminds Alison of “someone she had loved very much a long time ago in the wild loving days of her youth.”

  In writing “The Scent,” Margaret made two significant departures from autobiographical fact. Each character is ten years younger, a change that highlights the supreme allure of the older friend while underlining (perhaps also justifying) the younger woman’s contrasting lack of self-possession—a contrast that proved crucial to Margaret’s relationship with Michael Strange.

  Margaret also made both her protagonists married women. Although she had often expressed the wish to be married, in this story she seems to have come face to face with doubts as to the desirability of marriage. When Carrie returns from a vacation she has taken by herself, she is met by her husband at the station. “That night as Carrie sank back into her own bed and burried [sic] her head in the pillow waiting for Richard to come from his bath, she began to remember Alison. . . . She could even smell the scent Alison used, in the pillow. She could actually smell it, she thought.” The next morning,

  when she woke slowly half dreaming she could still smell that scent of Alison’s.

  After bathing she got back in bed to have breakfast. And there it was again. . . . She grabbed her pillow. . . . There was no mistaking it.

  The maid came in at that moment with the breakfast tray and telephone messages. There was one from Alison. She had called and would call back at noon.

  The maid was leaving the room.

  “If anyone calls today, tell them I am not at home,” she said.

  There Margaret thought to end the story with one portentous additional line: “She had to have time to think.” This highly charged last scene, with its intimations—redolent of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart”—of a troubled conscience, suggests the depth and disturbing nature of the passionate feelings that Michael Strange had unexpectedly aroused in her.

  One of the chief and abiding facts of their long, erratic, and emotionally difficult relationship was that Margaret and Michael each seriously misjudged the extent of her own and the other’s talent, and that both benefited from the misunderstanding in some important way. As in the two parallel worlds set out in The Little Fireman, Margaret and Michael Strange constructed between themselves a paired reality in which Margaret was the little poet writing little books for children while Michael was the big poet writing poetry and giving public recitations for the spiritual enlightenment of the world at large. For Margaret this
was to prove a compelling emotional construct, a credible myth through which to explore both her most deep-seated self-doubts and her most ardent aspirations as a writer and a human being. Michael Strange, in turn, was all too willing to receive the younger woman’s adulation and to feed her doubts.

  “The way she laughed . . . and all the time those swift black eyes peering out even while she laughed never missing even the flicker of a shadow across another face.”40 All-seeing, elaborately self-assured, this was how Margaret characterized Michael in “Luncheon,” another unpublished story set in the Cafe Lafayette, a fashionable room a few blocks from Margaret’s Greenwich Village apartment where she often met friends for drinks or tea. Writing in the first person, Margaret dropped the pretense of disguising the other woman’s identity, and had Michael address the narrator as “Goldie” (one of Michael’s nicknames for Margaret).

  The first to arrive, the story’s narrator chooses a table and orders a Vermouth Cassis. Minutes later, Michael appears, “or rather . . . made her entrance. She stood in the doorway swirled in furs like a Cossac [sic] princess and looked all around the room and spoke to a waiter who rushed to her side. And then she saw me and came across the floor. . . . Then . . . we started to talk, and-to watch each other.”

  Conversation centers mainly on men, in particular their mutual friend, Bill (an obvious reference to Bill Gaston). The narrator speaks of her “weekend and telaphone [sic] relationship” with him. (In the typescript Margaret struck the words “weekend and”; Gaston, after all, was married.) When the older woman inquires about her love life generally, the narrator describes it as a blank, “except as a waiting game waiting for someone like an old buzzard.”

  The conversation proceeds in this one-sided manner, with the older friend asking the questions and revealing little of herself, at least intentionally. But in another untitled story from this series, Michael Strange emerges as a woman in turmoil.41 A small party of weekend guests, many of them strangers to each other, gather for Friday supper at a Long Island ocean-front retreat (unnamed but plainly Harry Tweed’s house at Montauk). They include a sculptor, tall, quick-witted, the hostess’s “ex-lover seventeen times removed,” now an ailing, elderly man, and the artist’s physician, an eminent gland specialist. Somehow the hostess has gotten the mistaken impression that the doctor is a psychoanalyst. On realizing her error, she is disappointed as she had hoped to have him serve as a foil for her own determined “resistance” to the “outrage” that psychoanalysis represents to the “human spirit.” A young lawyer and his wife are also among the guests as is a “blonde girl,” who “sat there laughing and watching and talking just enough not to appear silent and drinking a lot of white sautern [sic]. The same sautern they [the girl and the hostess] had drunk every evening during the past week when they had been alone down here on the coast together, writing and reading and with the endless exploratory talk that goes with getting to know someone.” They had gone swimming together and had taken long walks in the rain, and “laughed a lot and read aloud together and both of them, she at the age of fifty and her new friend at the age of thirty had found a still questioning unlost youthfulness together. It had been an idyl all it’s [sic] own.”