Margaret Wise Brown Page 5

  Running to hounds was an ancient pastime when King Edward III of England took it up in the mid-fourteenth century. In the British-inspired American version of the sport, hours of rugged physical exercise were capped by a convivial late-afternoon high tea. While out in the woods, the men and women of the club participated as equals and were judged only on their stamina. As both a formidable runner and a charming companion, Margaret became a much admired member of the group.

  Margaret herself provided the most telling clue as to what hunting meant to her. In an undated poem titled “Running/Running to Hounds,” the hunter’s quest is a contest in which the victory is won not over a fleeing animal but over time itself: “An old body/Rises up in the new/And leans forward into the wind/Made by its own running/Long strong leaps/As though the fields had springs/And my body hangs from the shoulders/As the shoulders help it along/And my fists climb the air/And the lean/muscles of/an old stomach/Come in my new stomach/And my legs run/on through my/weariness/Keep running.”5

  During the summer of 1934 time weighed heavily on her. Her new club was in suspension till the fall and her job still bored her. With no compelling reason for staying, Margaret quit work and headed north to meet Roberta and Basil at Don Dickerman’s Camp, an offbeat resort on Kezar Lake in southwestern Maine frequented by writers and theater people. There she socialized with the other guests, took part in a play reading, and wandered off for solitary afternoons of boating and hiking. “I am leading the lusty life of the woods,” she wrote Marguerite Hearsey. “There are roaring fires at night. I plunge naked into the lake in the morning and we . . . laugh deep down in our stomaches like Vikings.”6

  One afternoon, after paddling out alone to the middle of Kezar Lake in a kayak, Margaret became absorbed in a book and, looking up only “at intervals,” was surprised to find on finishing it that she had come more than two miles to the Lake’s unfamiliar far end. “I moored the boat . . . and wandered up a road to an old country store, to leave the book so that it wouldn’t get wet going home against a wind that had come up suddenly. . . . Then I had a wonderful battle against black waves and wind to get home.” The battle “brought out all the bad parts of my nature.” Taking pride in her honesty as she faulted herself for a serious breech of her personal code, she admitted that she had wanted “to signal three speed boats that passed for a tow. But I didn’t. (Only one and they didn’t see me, but that halfhearted attempt marred the core of my victory.)”

  Evidently, Margaret had also gone to Maine with hopes of proving herself as a writer, perhaps by turning out a polished short story or two; she suffered a disappointment on finding herself too restless and impatient to do so. So out of sorts was she that she felt “as though I were cheating and quibbling with time whenever I read a book” instead of trying to write one. Nevertheless, she wrote her old teacher, she realized that

  there seem to be times of reception and times of creation and it is perhaps difficult not to confuse the two. . . . Now I am living such a rich life of all the senses with pine smoke and clear air and distant mountains and wind and sails, that some good cannot fail to come out of it in the spirit. . . . All of me is responding entirely. That, to respond entirely, is my idea of complete health.

  It was largely through Margaret’s correspondence with Marguerite Hearsey, the Hollins professor who had encouraged her to think about becoming a writer, that Margaret kept this possibility alive for herself. She wrote Miss Hearsey often, and the dedicated, kindly older woman was happy enough to serve as a mentor and sounding board.

  Back in New York in September of 1934, Margaret found in city routine a more problematic kind of intensity, a “strange mixture,” she wrote, “of Subway rush and hurried moments of awareness.”7 Roberta had returned home to a Great Neck teaching job, a professional advance which, modest though it was, underlined for Margaret her own lack of direction. Thinking that the enforced discipline of a course might help her get on with writing, she enrolled for the fall semester in a fiction workshop at Columbia University.

  Margaret anticipated the course, for which her father had agreed to foot the bill, in fear and trembling. If she was to have a career as impractical, from Robert Brown’s point of view, as that of a writer, she would have to prove herself soon. What was more, she had long since internalized the pressure to do so. On the evening before her first class, she scratched out a letter to Miss Hearsey “so horridly full of information” that she felt the need to apologize for it. “Information,” she considered, “is like a plot. A plot is like the sound of the word. ‘Plot.’ . . . I will never be a writer.”8

  The Columbia workshop proved a disheartening misadventure. Years later, in an interview in Life magazine, she shrugged off the experience with the wry throwaway remark that she had simply not been able to “think up any plots.”9 But it may not have been just for want of invention that Margaret found the class so trying that she dropped out before the end of the term. In the absence of story ideas, she seems to have fallen back for material on some of her own painful recent experiences with romance and at home. Perhaps writing about these troubles forced her to focus on them all the more intently.

  One such story, “In Ten Years,”10 begins with a scathing account of life with her parents: “Mr. Rabber got in his car. He noticed as he crossed his lawn . . . that it was a good day.—A most irrelevant observation, however, for Mr. Rabber had no time for a good day. As he told his daughter, dollars didn’t grow on trees, and he had to get into town and work.”11

  Elizabeth, the grown daughter from whose point of view Margaret told the story, watches her father from a distance. “She didn’t make a sound for fear he would speak to her. He would only upset her if he spoke. He might shout at her; and the morning was so beautiful. . . . She shuddered and turned to her book.”

  It was doubtless tempting to treat as fictions—as characters to be parodied and paraded at will—those people with whom Margaret was not getting along. Paradoxically—and the paradox spoke to her very core—Margaret was never a more conscientious truth teller than as the author of these outwardly fictional character studies. However inconsequential as literature, the pieces seem to have served her as occasions for taking stock of herself, her limitations and prospects, and her capacity for self-knowledge.

  Elizabeth longs for the day she will live on her own, and she is evidently on no better terms with her mother than with her father.

  Elizabeth’s mother was . . . too quick for her. She called down from her bedroom for her daughter to perform the first of what the latter expected would be an interminable list of small and for the most part unnecessary errands. . . .

  “What shall I get?” [Elizabeth asked.]

  “Oranges, and see if we need any butter and eggs . . .”

  “I can telephone for all that, Mother; there is no need to make a trip down town.”

  “No you can’t. You must pick things out.”

  “But there is nothing you have mentioned, Mother, that has to be picked out.” . . .

  “You grow more like your Father every day. . . . You should go to a doctor. You used to be a sweet tempered child.”

  The action continues with a scene that in all likelihood was Margaret’s fictionalized effort to clarify her emotional confusion at the time of her engagement, two years earlier, to George Armi-stead. Elizabeth’s boyfriend is expected for dinner; the couple has agreed to ask Mr. Rabber’s permission to marry.

  At five o’clock, Elizabeth bathed and dressed, went out into the garden. She broke some branches from an apple tree, little red flower buds among the pale green of the leaves[,] returned to the house and arranged them. . . . [Then] she drove to the station to meet Jim, who had a good job in New York. The train came in and she heard the rush of it all through her.

  The couple’s emotionally flat conversations suggest a distant, troubled relationship. Tellingly, this and other short stories that Margaret finished all end vaguely, inconclusively, as though their outcome lay in her own future, a fut
ure she could not predict and felt was largely beyond her control. Moreover, in the story “In Ten Years” Elizabeth’s point of view remains blurred; it is unclear whether she realizes the irony of her imminent marriage to a young business success well on his way to becoming a difficult man just like her father.

  Margaret succeeded in making painfully vivid the troubled atmosphere of an outwardly placid and prosperous home. Among her instructor’s criticisms was the comment “Couldn’t you manage to convey a little more intensely that they [Elizabeth and Jim] love each other?”11 In all honesty, Margaret could not.

  That fall (of 1934), Margaret had taken an apartment in Manhattan, which her father had agreed to finance. With the help of a new city friend, Inez Camprubi, she found a small place on MacDougal Street, in the proverbial heart of Greenwich Village.

  Inez, a painter, lived in the apartment across the hall. She and Margaret began to spend a good deal of time together, talking about art, Gertrude Stein, and their personal crises and passions of the moment. Theirs was an easy-going, companionable friendship. Inez impressed Margaret as a person of great inner resolve. She had had the independence to decide not to go to college, choosing instead to live for a time in Spain, in the household of her uncle, the illustrious poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. In addition to pursuing her art, she was enrolled as a student in the Cooperative School for Student Teachers, an intensive program of the highly innovative Bureau of Educational Experiments. The bureau, which had come to be known by its west Greenwich Village address as Bank Street, was an internationally respected center of childhood development research as well as a functioning nursery school and a training ground for teachers.

  In letters to Marguerite Hearsey Margaret praised Inez for her forthright manner and, as she somewhat cryptically put it, for the “more or less social work” of her Bank Street activities. Margaret’s talented friend also proved a sympathetic listener when it came time to review her prospects for a literary career. Margaret did not feel very optimistic on that score. At least, she told Inez, she had managed to devise a method for staving off depression. On awakening in the morning, Margaret lay in bed for a time, surveying the room around her to the last detail. One by one she noted every particular of the room and the scene out her window that gave her pleasure. Then—grasping for straws or counting her blessings—she wrote them all down in a list.12

  The strenuous exercise of running to hounds provided another release. One Sunday Margaret took Inez along with her to Long Island. The two friends had a glorious time. Inez won Margaret’s admiration all over again by easily keeping pace with her. Inez, for her part, was richly amused when she noticed that Margaret, instead of staying as close as possible behind the hounds, as beaglers were supposed to do, simply ran off now and then in her own direction.

  Margaret spent an evening that fall with Frances Stoakley, Hollins class of 1929 and its leading literary light, who had come to New York to make her reputation as a poet. Together they read aloud poems they both admired, like Thomas Wyatt’s “My lute be still, for I have done.” (“How complete that is and honest in its mood,” Margaret wrote Miss Hearsey.)13 Through Frances she discovered the poetry of Emily Dickinson, reflecting in another letter, “I can’t understand how I never read her. I must have confused her with Sara Teasdale and some of the ‘Ah the pain of it all, girls.’” Margaret also reread the books that had meant the most to her in college, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Orlando, some Romantic poetry, and (to “cure to sleep a bad attack of futility”) the second part of Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” which ends with the accidental death of one worthy knight, the triumph in love of his equally worthy rival, and the admonition to bear oneself through life with equanimity, for “alday meeteth men at unset stevene” (one is constantly keeping appointments one never made).14

  That fall, Margaret also thought about studying painting, but after one uninspiring session at the Art Students League she decided “to get a pile of green vegetables and paint by myself at home instead of paying to paint a pile of naked figures.”15

  “In my own life,” she wrote her former teacher, “I feel like a green vegetable—peas—that arn’t [sic] cooked yet but are doing a lot of whirling about in the kettle.”

  As Margaret whirled, she also trudged through Gertrude Stein’s long and arduous The Making of Americans:

  In this book I am given new solutions, brand new ideas. . . . There is a rhythm of American day to day existence and relationship that is as certain as the rhthm [sic] of the ocean and as binding as the relationship of the ocean to the little waves that crash on our shore. . . . I think she is the first to write of many people without cutting them off from the grandparents who were once little children whose parents produced them and from the flow of life that goes on about them and that went before them and that will go on after them.16

  One evening in early November, she and Frances Stoakley met to listen to Stein—her “beautiful voice”—on the radio.

  One of my insignificant joys in her clarity was her remark, when her punctuation was challenged, that “If a reader doesn’t know that a question is a question when he reads it, then a question mark can’t tell him.” I prayed to one of God’s clerks who handles his lesser business that Dr. Janney was listening.17

  Later that month Margaret attended one of three lectures given by Gertrude Stein at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Buddha like and formidable in appearance, Stein was disarmingly down-to-earth as she spoke and laughed and occasionally teased the audience by asking (a certain reputation for obfuscation having preceded her) whether they were having trouble following her meaning.

  Margaret came away exalted. And the memory of that evening stayed with her even as she packed her bags in defeat and moved back in with her parents in time for Thanksgiving. On New Year’s Eve, as she closed out 1934 in a letter to Marguerite Hearsey and as the “very solemn” mood that always descended upon her at this time of year asserted itself, she ruefully considered the “weakness of every undisciplined area of my mind, which, as you know, is most of it.”18 On a recent visit to New York, Miss Hearsey had spent an afternoon with her. “After I left you,” Margaret recalled, “I found a large bunch of narcissus in the Subway for 15ȼ, and for 15ȼ it was Spring. . . . I pause here being frightened that this sounds like Gertrude Stine [sic]. But no. If I think that, I can’t write to you so the words had best come out as they will.” She was uncertain even of her authenticity as a letter writer.

  Over the next several weeks, however, her situation began to change. That winter she found temporary employment as a child’s companion, a part-time job that hardly felt like work at all. Her duties consisted of gently prodding twelve-year-old Dorothy Wag-staff to do her lessons and accompanying that very wealthy young girl to dog shows, movies, teas, and on horseback rides, all between the hours of two and five-thirty on weekday afternoons.19 For her services she received the tidy sum of fifty dollars a month. From Margaret’s standpoint, this was clearly an interim measure. She had still to find her own equivalent of the fulfilling lifework, the “something . . . outside of herself” that her friend Inez had committed herself to at Bank Street. Margaret was painting again at the Art Students League, but she saw these exertions too as a stopgap, an “indirect approach to writing” or a limbering-up exercise.

  In the spring of 1935, having continued to receive good reports about Bank Street from Inez, Margaret took a first step toward entering the Bank Street program herself. Ordinarily a new student began in the fall, taking a complete battery of courses while at the same time acquiring on-the-job training as a teaching assistant at one of several New York—area progressive schools with which Bank Street was affiliated. Margaret, however, arranged to start as a student teacher that very spring, before even applying for admission to the Cooperative School for Student Teachers. It was rather like her to do her best to bend the rules in a situation about which she felt ambivalent. She wanted to waste no time in finding out whether teaching might satisfy h
er professionally. Following directly in Inez’s path, she reported for work at the Little Red School House, where she was assigned to the second grade class, “the Eights.”

  Of her regular encounters with the Little Red School House’s eight-year-olds, she wrote to Miss Hearsey: “They tell me stories and I write them down. Amazing. And also the pictures they paint. It must be true [as the school’s regular teachers and staff believed] that children are born creative. I love best the little colored children. And they give long spontaneous plays.” Margaret, however, had already come to an important conclusion: “I don’t want to teach.” The previous several weeks she had been too tired, or “too over charged,” to pursue her writing. “A few poems. But really nothing. . . . And I hear Time whirring by. I am very sorry.”20

  Perhaps, then, it was only for want of an alternative that Margaret proceeded to apply for admission to Bank Street’s Cooperative School for Student Teachers. For philosophical reasons (and perhaps for financial reasons as well) Bank Street rarely turned down a serious applicant, but acceptance into the program was not guaranteed. In evaluating candidates, Elizabeth Lamb (the perceptive, down-to-earth staff member who interviewed Margaret) looked for signs of an inquiring, flexible mind and an overall impression of emotional wellbeing.21 She found Margaret clearly suitable—a good-natured, bright, and exceptionally poised young woman. At twenty-five, Margaret was a year or two older than the average applicant—well and good, as personal maturity was an asset in work with children. It also counted in her favor that she had lived in Europe and in the American South; in theory at least, Bank Street strove for a broad cultural diversity in its students and staff. She was accepted for the fall of 1935.