Margaret Wise Brown Read online

  In Little Fur Family, one of her best-known books for children, Margaret recounted in strikingly similar terms the adventures of an imaginary “fur child” just coming into his own in the “wild wild wood” where he lives. Out for a walk, the little hero pulls a fish from the river, takes a good look at it, then throws it back into the river unharmed. Next he catches a bug in mid-flight, examines and releases it. Finally, the fur child spies a tiny fur creature in the grass, a miniature version of himself; the fur child picks him up, as a parent might a child, kisses him on the nose, and lets him run off again.26

  Both “Discovery” and Little Fur Family are stories of life and death—of life over death. As an author, Margaret often returned to the compelling (and at the time largely unexplored) theme of the power struggles implicit in growing up: young children’s determination to make the world conform to their will and to acquire a sense of self-mastery. By sparing the lives of the fish, the bug, and his miniature counterpart, the fur child shows that he knows how to use his new-found power benignly and well. In the poignant logic of the tale, acquiring that knowledge is recognizing the power of love.

  Robert Brown seems to have been most at home in life when at his office. As a father and husband he was the classic proud provider, a man confident in his views, who expected, in return for the fairly bountiful portion of material security he bestowed on his family, that life at home should largely go his way.

  Impatient and quick to anger, he sometimes resorted to physical punishment when it came to disciplining young Gratz. More often, however, he dealt with misbehavior by simply threatening to withhold the offender’s allowance. Around the age of six, Margaret developed a rather precocious habit that may have contained her comment on her father’s machinations in this domain; whenever she became cross with someone, she would threaten not to leave that person such and such in her will.27 Where she had heard talk of wills and legacies is not known, but it was altogether like her—and in keeping with the mythologizing imagination later revealed in her books—to recast a prosaic dollars-and-cents ultimatum in more fundamental life-and-death terms. If death was a part of experience, she would reckon with it. She would love the rabbit while it lived and skin the dead rabbit for its fur, extracting from death life’s pleasurable essences. She would tell stories to Death, as it were, from The Book of Knowledge.

  On the one occasion when Margaret tried to run away from home, she laid her plans carefully, publicizing her escape route in advance with their friendly neighbor, Mr. Storms, to assure the drama its full effect. It’s not clear how old she was at the time, but she seems not to have made it out of the neighborhood; the ever-resourceful Margaret must have been quite young. Perhaps, like the hero of The Runaway Bunny—like virtually all child runaways—Margaret did not so much wish to leave home as to know that someone there would notice her absence and care enough to find her.

  Just why Margaret might have wanted to call attention to herself in that particular way is a matter for speculation. She was the middle child, and middle children often feel at a disadvantage in the struggle for their parents’ affections. There were Robert Brown’s frequent absences, his more than occasionally absent manner when home, and the added strain his comings and goings placed on Margaret’s mother, who suffered from chronic high blood pressure severe enough at times to become disabling. Later, as she approached adulthood herself, Margaret seems to have felt an increasingly urgent need to find someone—mentor or friend—to fill the void left unattended by her parents.

  An emotionally resilient, sanguine young child, Margaret discovered a refuge of sorts in nature. Deep-seated affections were transferred onto the landscape, to the small animals she observed and kept as pets, to wildflowers, trees, sky, and water. As a writer she would describe the natural world with an intensity that, in Proust’s words, “makes us not merely regard a thing as a spectacle, but believe in it as a unique essence.”

  In The Little Fir Tree, a Christmas story, Margaret gave comforting substance to the fearfully intangible feelings of loneliness that all small children know: “Always the little fir tree looked over at the big fir trees in the great dark forest. He wished he were part of the forest or part of something, instead of growing all alone out there, a little fir tree in a big empty world.”28

  And in a passage in The Golden Sleepy Book, she transformed a simple stock taking of the natural order into a vision of loneliness banished: “All over the world the animals are going to sleep—the birds and the bees, the horse, the butterfly and the cat.

  “In their high nests . . . the fish hawks are going to sleep. . . .

  “And the fish in the sea sleep . . . like fish . . . in some quiet current of the sea.”29

  Early in 1923, when Robert Brown learned that he was to make another extended trip in India, Maude decided she should accompany him. An elaborate scheme was devised to allow their daughters to travel with them a part of the way. That summer, Margaret (just turned thirteen), Roberta (eleven), and their parents sailed for Europe in first-class accommodations aboard the Dutch liner Veendam.

  The Browns toured Holland, then went on to Paris for more sightseeing. From there the girls were taken to Lausanne, where they spent the next two years at an exclusive girls’ school, the Château Brillantmont. Robert and Maude boarded a ship for the long journey to India.

  The following summer, Maude returned to Europe to travel with the children, including Gratz, who came over on his vacation from boarding school. Though keeping, as always, to a modest budget, she was determined to make the most of their adventure. One evening in Monte Carlo (where minors were barred from the gaming rooms) Maude concealed Gratz under her evening coat rather than have him miss the opulent spectacle of the casinos. In Venice, they all posed for pictures in St. Mark’s Square and inspected churches and art museums, as they had done in Florence and Amsterdam. Then Gratz sailed for New York and Maude left the girls in their Lausanne school before returning to Paris for some time by herself.

  Because most of the Château Brillantmont’s students were English and its classes were conducted entirely in French, two years of study there were bound to be a broadening experience for the suburban New York sisters. The school’s rigid disciplinary regime could nonetheless be rather trying, and Margaret in particular found it so. Students were required to keep separate pairs of shoes for indoor and outdoor wear, and once a day they were dispatched out along Lake Geneva, marching in double file with a matron bringing up the rear to keep them in good order. Margaret’s knowledge of the French language (and of Swiss ski resorts, which she and her fellow students visited on holidays) would later serve her well. She would not, however, remember her years at the school with much affection, but rather (after the numerous dislocations of the past) as one more personal upheaval she had endured.

  By the spring of 1925, when Margaret and Roberta came home to the United States, the house in Beechurst had been sold and her parents were living in temporary quarters on Long Island before leaving for Maine for the summer. The plan was to return in the fall and take an apartment in Forest Hills, in the general vicinity of where they wished to settle, and begin house hunting. (The new house was to be closer than the last to Manhasset, where Robert Brown’s motorboat was moored). Anticipating the coming changes, Maude Brown enrolled in an interior decoration class. The girls spent the year at the nearby Kew Forest School.

  The family celebrated the Christmas of 1925 at Buck Hill Falls, a Pennsylvania winter resort where an unpretentious holiday atmosphere prevailed. One Sunday, in an incident redolent of their earlier collaborative mischief making, Margaret and Roberta wandered into a Quaker prayer meeting. Feigning ignorance, one of the girls broke the silence by saying to the other in a loud whisper, “Why is everyone so quiet around here?” Then both girls bolted out the door.30

  Maude Brown had a more serious religious encounter during that vacation. Another hotel guest, a Mrs. Sable of Rockport, Massachusetts, engaged her in a conversation about Theosophy.31
Back in New York, Maude began attending meetings of the Theosophical Society and visited the Sables in Rockport for a part of each of the following two summers, taking Margaret and Roberta along with her. Robert Brown did not accompany them, preferring to fish off the coast of Maine. As would become increasingly apparent, Maude Brown’s newfound interest in a spiritualist philosophy which posited the oneness of humankind with the universal All took root at a time when her relationship with her husband was beginning to unravel.

  The two-story stucco house at 8 Ridge Drive which Robert Brown purchased in well-to-do Great Neck, New York, was ready for the family by the fall of 1926, just as Roberta and Margaret were leaving for yet another school.

  Dana Hall, the private girls’ preparatory school in Wellesley, Massachusetts that the two sisters entered as members of the class of 1928, was known for the rigorous academic training it offered girls bound for the Seven Sisters colleges. Latin and classical literature were emphasized, along with English literature, French, and mathematics. Music and art classes were considered of minor significance, as at most other schools of the time. Most striking about the Dana Hall regime was the importance the school placed on the development of intellectual self-confidence and independence. As Dana Hall’s owner and principal Helen Temple Cooke declared, “the task of the School is to help each girl to think.”32

  Dana Hall students were instantly recognizable in their navy blue middy blouses and pleated skirts. On trips to town, which were always chaperoned, they were required to wear gloves and hats as well. High heels were at all times expressly forbidden. But for all the school’s nettlesome rules and regulations, Dana Hall’s faculty (which included a future president of progressive Sarah Lawrence College) took a generally farsighted view of the social questions of the day—not least of all of the role that educated women might play in the modern world. Anticipating the arrival of a group of visitors from all-black Howard University, Helen Cooke’s assistant addressed the Dana Hall girls (all of them white) to ask if any would refuse to eat dinner with a black person.33 When a few students said they would, she pressed them for their reasons; in this way, the faculty and staff challenged the girls to rethink their received prejudices. Margaret later recalled Dana Hall with gratitude as the first school she had attended that made learning seem worth the effort.

  Margaret excelled at sports while remaining in her sister’s shadow academically. (She nonetheless managed to place in the first quarter of their class of one hundred and twelve.) She impressed Helen Cooke as a well-groomed, able person of above average intelligence who needed to be prodded a bit to do her best. Classmates nicknamed Margaret “Tim” for her straw-blond hair, reminiscent of timothy. Her fellow seniors voted her “Most Serious”—Roberta was voted “Brightest.”33 But as commencement day approached in the spring of 1928, it appeared that Margaret might not graduate.

  She had induced the class valedictorian and its treasurer to join her one evening on a moonlight walk along a remote path off limits to students after dark. A teacher caught the group and duly advised them to report their offense, for which others had suffered expulsion, to the principal. Days passed as the matter was taken under advisement.

  Margaret, one suspects, had taken along her friend the valedictorian as insurance. It was finally decided that the three should graduate. At commencement Helen Cooke quoted Browning— “Grow old with me;/The best is yet to be”—and with that, bid Margaret, Roberta, and their classmates farewell.

  At Dana Hall Margaret had elected not to take the mathematics and Latin courses required for admission to the more selective northeastern schools. She considered junior college, then (most likely it was her mother’s idea) decided instead to apply to Maude Brown’s alma mater, Hollins College.34

  By then Gratz was an engineering major at M.I.T. and, much to Robert Brown’s satisfaction, was preparing for a business career. But it was only over their father’s objections and after Maude Brown’s intervention on their behalf that Margaret and Roberta applied to college at all. Taking a conventional view of the matter, he thought a college education would be wasted on them, that the proper thing for his daughters to do was to marry well, have children, and stay at home. In the aftermath of that disagreement, family members went their separate ways that summer; Robert Brown to Maine for a fishing trip, Margaret south to visit school friends, Roberta and Maude to a quiet New Hampshire retreat. And that fall of 1928, the two sisters did go off to college, Roberta to prestigious Vassar, Margaret to the less demanding Hollins College, near Roanoke, Virginia.

  Referred to with pride as “the Mount Holyoke of the South” by its partisans, Hollins College had the more dubious reputation in the North of a Southern finishing school for well-to-do girls, a place of quaint May Day rituals, untaxing academic pursuits, and chaperoned decorum. When Margaret arrived on campus, she found herself a welcome initiate of a warm family-run institution where it was equally possible to slip by with a minimum of strain or to acquire all the basic elements of a well-rounded liberal arts education.

  Margaret had applied for admission in the usual way, filling out her application with the affecting candor of one more intent on taking the measure of her own worth than impressing others.

  Could she sing? “No.” Play a musical instrument? “No.” Draw or paint? “No.” Act? “I don’t know.” She enjoyed writing and had already written both stories and poems. Had she won any academic scholarships or prizes? “No.” Did she expect to graduate from college? “I don’t know.” Did she feel ready to enter heartily into the life of the school? “Yes, I do.”35

  The focal point of the Hollins campus was the quadrangle formed of ambling three-story red brick neo-classical buildings softened by touches of white Victorian gingerbread. Broad wooden porches, balconies, and colonnades edged the central lawn, which was crisscrossed by stone footpaths. East and West buildings, the student dormitories, faced each other like grounded riverboats across a yard shaded by splendid tall white ash trees. “Is it too vain a fancy,” wrote Margaret’s favorite literature professor, Marguerite Hearsey, in the graduation yearbook, “to find in [the quadrangle’s] colonnades and columns, in the very brick and mortar of our physical Hollins, a symbol of our kinship with the Greeks?”36

  Stately Main building, on the quadrangle’s northern rim, was the school’s formal center and hearth. In its Old Green Drawing Room students received their guests and took tea with visiting campus dignitaries. Miss Mattie Cocke, Hollins’ elderly but formidable president, successor to her equally formidable father, had her office in Main as did her son, the dean; for nearly all of its eighty year history, Hollins had been owned and administered by the Cocke family.

  At Hollins, with its small, secluded campus and a student population of fewer than three hundred women, everyone soon got to know everyone. Students took their meals and attended evening chapel together. Throughout the year there were numerous occasions when the entire Hollins community gathered for guest lectures, theater performances, and a full calendar of school rituals: the annual fall trek up nearby Tinker Mountain, the Christmas pantomime, and the gala May Day revel staged in the Forest of Arden. From the first, Margaret gave herself over to these school traditions, to the romance of them. It mattered deeply to her that Hollins had been Maude’s school. Just being there allowed her to imagine a special closeness with her mother, a longed-for feeling of attachment that, ironically, remained a good deal more elusive when she was actually at home.

  Margaret, who continued to be known by her Dana Hall nickname, “Tim,” nonetheless soon acquired a reputation around campus as an individualist. The best of company, she quoted from Winnie the Pooh and gave parties to celebrate unbirthdays and the arrival of asparagus at the local market, but Margaret was also something of a loner. Above all fellow students learned to expect the unexpected from her; boarding a train on her way to a date at the University of Virginia, she was observed carrying a rabbit.

  A certain mystique attached itself to the beautiful
, fair-haired adventuress from the North whose preferred New York meeting place was said to be the last pew of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and who once, on realizing she could not keep an appointment there, had sent her friend a telegram addressed to “Last pew, St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”37 “A law unto herself,” observed history professor Margaret P. Scott, “and definitely not a poseur.”38 (Scott had known Margaret almost from her first day on campus; some thirty years earlier, their mothers had been friends at Hollins.)

  Entering with advanced standing in French, Margaret took a standard assortment of freshmen courses, but did not apply herself very seriously to her studies. She preferred to take long walks in the forest or up the narrow footpath to the Cocke family cemetery, with its stand of cedars and its commanding view of the Shenandoah Valley’s deeply folded terrain. Throwing off her shoes, she might wade into Garvin’s Creek, which ran just west of the quadrangle (perhaps coaxing a less adventurous companion in with her) or linger in the apple orchard or by the great weeping willows that lined the main campus road and which, like the fluted white columns of the quadrangle’s colonnades, were said to embody the spirit of Hollins.

  That spring, a visiting former Hollins professor, Dr. John M. McBride, prefaced a formal lecture on Southern folklore with a nostalgic slide talk on Hollins life as he had known it a quarter of a century earlier. As the professor’s slides flashed onto the screen, the audience was amused by each passing glimpse of the vanished youths of this or that senior faculty member; but, as the campus paper reported, the evening’s loudest “shrieks of delighted recognition” were reserved for a picture that startled all present with a moment of déjà vu. But for her costume, the image of the strikingly beautiful twenty-year-old Maude Johnson might have been a portrait of Margaret.39