Margaret Wise Brown Read online

  Among the first things Margaret did on settling in was to scratch out a letter to Marguerite Hearsey. Miss Hearsey had recently left Hollins College to become principal of Abbot Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. Reporting her own change of address, Margaret vowed as before a higher authority that the opportunity represented by having thus secured a room of her own would not be lost on her. “I’m going to write every morning from nine till eleven,” she said, “or hate myself forever.”4 That evening, she told Miss Hearsey, her sister and Basil were giving her a party. She expected to meet more of their interesting friends, an Englishman and a “titled lady who [sang] cowboy songs” and ran the Drama Bookshop in mid-town, among others. Over the coming weeks, she said (sounding rather like a delinquent student promising to make good on an overdue assignment) she hoped to frequent the city’s art galleries and to reflect on the “artist’s medium of perception.”

  All this was written on assorted scraps of paper, the ragtag informality of which now struck her as fresh evidence of the mental disarray against which she intended to take her stand in these new quarters. “I will write you again, a clear logical letter all on the same piece of paper in good handwriting,” she assured her former teacher.

  Margaret’s Greenwich Village address was at least as fashionable as it was bohemian. Within a few blocks of her door stood all the Village landmarks one read about in the Saturday Evening Post: Washington Square Arch, the Provincetown Playhouse (where new works by Eugene O’Neill and Edna St. Vincent Millay had premiered in the 1920s), the art galleries and black-and-orange tea rooms of Eighth Street (the latter more often now the way stations of tourists than of poets, libertines, and revolutionaries), and the row houses, brick or brownstone, tumbledown or stately, that had at one time or another been home to Henry James, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Gellet Burgess, and John Dos Passos.

  Artists and writers like John Sloan, e. e. cummings, and William Glackens still lived in the neighborhood, but Greenwich Village during the 1930s was largely a genteel gloss of bohemias past. (Real estate values actually rose for most of the decade.) Intellectuals continued to make their homes in Margaret’s new neighborhood, but they were less often the wild-eyed garret types for which the Village had been known than the respectable salaried varieties—college professors, magazine editors, publishers. Among Margaret’s neighbors were the Mitchells; the New Republic’s gallantly indignant managing editor, Bruce Bliven, Sr., and his wife Rosie, a Bank Street staff volunteer; Margaret’s own sister Roberta and Basil, who taught history at a Manhattan private school; and Time magazine editor Robert Cantwell, whose apartment, always well stocked with reviewer’s copies of the latest books, doubled as an unofficial lending library.5

  An informal, collegial atmosphere prevailed among Village residents, a great many of whom shared Ivy League affiliations as well as social and professional ties. Neighbors knew each other, attended the same poetry readings, gave small dinner parties, socialized at gathering places like the White Horse Tavern and Jai Alai restaurant, and left their doors unlocked at night.

  Two blocks north of Margaret’s apartment was a crossroads of another sort, the New School for Social Research, with its streamlined modern quarters designed by Joseph Urban, heroic murals by Thomas Hart Benton and frescoes by Orozco, and an extraordinary faculty comprised in part of the cream of European scholars in exile.

  The New School had been conceived as a progressive experiment in continuing education, a kind of secular people’s temple of learning, open to all and dedicated to exploring new approaches to the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. But as Edmund Wilson caustically observed, at a dollar-fifty a ticket, few among the ranks of the working classes and the unemployed could afford to take advantage of the school’s numerous public programs; to become better informed about “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Capitalism,” “Movies and Talkies,” or “The Abnormal Mind,” one had to have a certain amount of capital of one’s own.6 Thanks to the allowance her father gave her, Margaret had the necessary funds and attended many New School programs.

  Within a block of Margaret’s door, in the shadow of the massive, soon-to-be-demolished Sixth Avenue El, bell-ringing volunteers daily collected donations in support of the anti-Franco fighters in Spain. For many at Bank Street, though not for Margaret, the Spanish Civil War was the most closely followed, passionately discussed event of the years immediately preceding the Second World War. To some at the school concern over the plight of Spain and participation in other activities of the Left were bright badges of political and social involvement wholly compatible with the progressive education movement’s idealistic determination to reshape society on more humane grounds. Bank Street as an institution had no official ideology or political slant (though it was widely enough perceived as being left-leaning for some upper middle class parents to think twice before sending their daughters there to study). The depth of political commitment of the students and staff certainly varied considerably. Margaret’s friend Jessica Gamble, a popular staff member, was a dabbler in radical reform, who enjoyed the romance of whispered phone messages about clandestine political rendezvous—“Comrade! The place: Coney Island. Bring your tennis sneakers!”—as she did any sport.7 For sport, Margaret preferred running to hounds with the Buckram Beagles.

  To help pay the rent and to lend added respectability (in her father’s eyes) to her new living arrangements, Margaret persuaded a beagling friend, Sophie Shoumatoff, to room with her. Among the amenities of their floor-through were a marble fireplace in the living room and a modern convenience, Venetian blinds. The rear windows faced a small enclosed garden. The street-side windows provided material for lighthearted speculation about the comings and goings of well-dressed gentlemen at the townhouse next door; the discreet brass and mahogany sign reading Marshall Chess Club was a thin cover indeed—or so Margaret assured gullible Sophie— for the thriving high-toned brothel that she insisted flourished within.

  The apartment’s unremarkable furnishings gave the desired impression of well-bred conventional taste, but the effect was offset rather strongly by the shifting menagerie that Margaret maintained at home. Visitors became flustered when the goat entrusted to her temporary care (awaiting transport to the family farm of Dorothy Wagstaff, the girl Margaret had. tutored after college) leapt from table to chair. Margaret’s flying squirrel, solitary and nocturnal, kept to the upper reaches of the window curtains until one evening, during a dinner party, it found its way into the bathroom, became disoriented, dived impulsively, and plunged into the toilet, where—a hapless minor player in Margaret’s screwball comedy—it drowned. A foppish, overarticulate young man who lived upstairs knocked at Margaret and Sophie’s door one evening to say he believed his Persian cat might “benefit psychologically” from a few hours spent in the company of her cat, Sneakers.8 In this way, life at 21 West Tenth Street proceeded.

  Sophie stayed on for about two months, keeping her share in the apartment a while longer as she planned her wedding to the Buckram Beagles’ hunting master, Edward Ward. Thereafter, she and Margaret would see each other mainly on Sunday afternoons of exhilaration and exhaustion, in pursuit of hares and hounds in the Long Island woods.

  Friends who visited Margaret in New York remarked on the wide circle of her casual acquaintances, including not only her neighbors but the policemen on the beat and the local shopkeepers—the French grocer, for example, who happened to be a former hunting master. Margaret was taking lessons from him, she told Dorothy Wagstaff, on the hunting horn. She had a kind word for everyone they passed in the street.

  New, lasting professional friendships were also forming. Bruce and Rosie Bliven’s apartment was a gathering place for everyone affiliated with Bank Street. There Margaret met their son Bruce, Jr. A journalist just out of Harvard, he shared a Village apartment with E. J. Kahn, Jr., a New Yorker staff writer still in his early twenties. By day, young Bruce wrote editorials for the liberal New York Evening Post; after work, h
e scoured pawnshops for second-hand musical instruments—saxophones, snare drums, trombones, and the like—and toted them home (as he explained) more because he liked to look at them than because he liked to play them. This was quite enough to win Margaret’s admiration. (A similarly playful idea about cross-mixing the aural and visual realms later gave rise, in the spring of 1939, to Margaret’s and Leonard Weisgard’s Noisy Book.) Bliven and Kahn invited her over for all-night sessions of youthful noise making which was jazz to the noise-makers if not to their neighbors. They met regularly on Thursday evenings to paint. Irwin Shaw was among the literary friends who sometimes joined them during these evenings of irremedially bad painting and smart conversation.

  It was gratifying to Margaret to be included in this group of accomplished young writers. That fall of 1936, however, there were also discouraging reminders of her own contrasting lack of accomplishment and independence. Although Margaret now lived in Manhattan, her legal residence was still her parents’ home. Early that fall, Robert Brown accompanied his daughters to the local Great Neck polling place to get them registered to vote in the upcoming presidential election (Roosevelt versus Landon). Roberta had been too young to vote in the previous election; Margaret, though of age, had not registered. Their father was well enough acquainted with his younger daughter’s views (he must have thought Roberta’s Democratic politics plain stubbornness) to realize that his one chance for paternal influence lay with the day-dreamer, Margaret. In the car, he played his favorite card, threatening to cut off her allowance unless she registered as a Republican. Roberta countered that Margaret ought to register with the party of her choice (if she had a choice), that registration, like voting, was a private matter. (Whether Robert Brown had his way on this occasion is not known; Margaret never told Roberta.)9

  Roberta and Basil Rauch were married on Saturday, October 31, 1936, in the parsonage of New York’s Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Although no longer a practicing Catholic, Basil had agreed to a religious ceremony to please his parents. Free-thinking Roberta, aware that her mother and father would be irritated by the arrangements, had little choice but to go along.10 Robert and Maude Brown did attend the ceremony, as did Robert’s older sister, Violet, who, vigilant as ever in matters concerning the Brown family name, had already made known her doubts as to the groom’s worthiness. Margaret, Gratz, and a friend of Basil’s completed the wedding party, the younger members of which adjourned after the ceremony for a celebratory Russian dinner in the Village.

  The newlyweds, both of whom now had teaching jobs, planned in the modern way to postpone their honeymoon until the following summer. As Robert Brown believed that married people ought to take financial responsibility for themselves, he promptly terminated his younger daughter’s annual allowance.

  Roberta’s marriage was the latest reminder to Margaret of the unsettled state of her own situation. With deepening resolve, she worked at her writing. Evenings, she labored over short stories while also turning out more of the children’s manuscripts that came so easily to her, often at the rate of a story or more a night.

  Gathering up her courage, Margaret began submitting stories to the New Yorker. Nothing came of these efforts, however, and she seems not to have mentioned her submissions to her various friends associated with the magazine; what Margaret plainly wanted was a clear and solid literary triumph, honestly come by, or none at all. She also sent off some of her children’s stories to Harper and Brothers. Her decision to try Harper (rather than, say, Dutton, the Here and Now books’ publisher) had been made quite casually after Jessica Gamble, whose judgment Margaret trusted, remarked one day that she thought highly of the firm. Some time around the first of the new year of 1937, Margaret fatalistically deposited her packet of manuscripts in the mail and did her best to forget about them.

  In February no word had yet come from Harper when Margaret left for Virginia for a week of hunting and socializing. In Richmond she unexpectedly crossed paths with a Hollins schoolmate, Adelaide Dana and her husband. Delighted to see each other, the three made a sidetrip together to Hollins. Even though Marguerite Hearsey was no longer at Hollins, Margaret enjoyed the visit. She and Adelaide went hiking in Happy Valley, waded in Garvin’s Creek, and sighted the year’s first robin. Crossing the quadrangle, they met Dr. Janney, who without skipping a step declared, “For Heaven’s sake! Here comes Bad—and Worse!” (Relating the incident in a letter to Miss Hearsey, Margaret took pride that she had been merely the “Bad” of the pair.) Most of all, being at Hollins reminded her that “New York City and the world today is not everything.”11

  Gratifying news awaited Margaret on her return to Manhattan. Harper and Brothers had accepted one of her stories. The editor, Louise Raymond, reported that she did not wish to change a word (though before the manuscript found its way into print, Margaret’s original title, “The Blue Gray Kitten,” somehow became When the Wind Blew).12 Raymond said she greatly admired the qualities of “color” and “extraordinary light” in Margaret’s story about an “old, old lady” who “lived by the side of the ocean . . . in a little shack made of wooden planks all whitened and silvered by the ocean winds.”13 Harper intended to make it a “swagger book,” with special printing and hand-blocked illustrations by Rosalie Slocum, the illustrator of Another Here and Now Story Book and a well-known figure in the Greenwich Village art scene.

  “I am excited,” Margaret wrote Marguerite Hearsey.

  For all the long groping and aspiring letters I used to write you in my struggles for coherance [sic], I never really dreamed that I would write, last of all be published and have other publishers asking for manuscripts. . . . I only pray that this beginning goes a long way before it ends and that someday I will be able to write grown up writing as well. Or write something for children that is literature.14

  When the check for her royalty advance came in the mail soon afterward, Margaret cashed it immediately. Horse-drawn flower carts were still a familiar sight in the Village; fresh from the bank, Margaret hailed a cart, told the vendor that she wanted to buy everything he had, and directed him to her front door, where the entire cartload was deposited. She decorated her apartment, then called her friends over for a party.

  Margaret’s contribution to Another Here and Now Story Book led to other opportunities. Dutton’s president, John Macrae, proposed to her that she write a children’s collection of her own. When the “man in a salmon-pink necktie” (as she later happily described the dapper if grandfatherly publisher) asked if she would accept the assignment, Margaret responded with caution.15 She would first have to know “how thick” a book he had in mind. A Dutton title of appropriate girth was brought in for her inspection. Having taken the measure of matters, she nodded her ascent. Terms remained to be worked out. Macrae generously offered a base royalty rate of 121/2 percent (10 percent was standard), to which Margaret, her sporting instinct aroused, countered, “Fifteen!” Taken aback and eager to secure her services for Dutton, Macrae agreed. Margaret also arranged for her sister Roberta, who she assured Macrae drew in a “child-like way,” to illustrate the book (afterwards known as The Fish with the Deep Sea Smile). “In those days, fifty dollars was fifty dollars,” Roberta recalled years later with a little laugh.16 She had had no previous training or experience as an illustrator, and although she did an adequate job on the book, she never tried her hand at children’s book art again. For Margaret the project was the first of many in which she took part not only as author but as an impresario enlisting new talent for the field.

  In the spring of 1937, flush with this quick succession of accomplishments and with a drawerful of newly printed stationery at her disposal, Margaret wrote Marguerite Hearsey a letter brimming with pride.17 Harper had offered her a second contract for an adaptation from the French of Y. Lacôte’s The Children’s Year, a calendar for young readers, and had accepted two more of her own manuscripts. There was the Dutton story collection and the possibility of an offer from Viking. One editor was even urging her, pro
lific author that she had become, to consider publishing under two or more different names. In all, it was an impressive showing.

  Romance, or something like romance, had also entered her life in the shadowy form of a “good quiet man from Virginia” (unnamed and not mentioned again in future letters to Marguerite Hearsey) whom Margaret thought she might marry the following spring, unless in the meantime “some ruthless bounder” should come along “that I could love and then if such a strange felicity should happen I would give anything for two children before I’m thirty.”

  The bright, independent-minded “modern girl,” Margaret and her fellow Hollins students had been told by a visiting lecturer, did well to choose a career first and afterwards find a husband. Having put the first decision behind her—“it is all so sudden and amazing that I can laugh loud over it”—she hoped now to complete the business. Meanwhile, she wrote, “one submits to the unexpectedness of existence.”

  A passage from Virginia Woolf s new book, The Years, had lately stuck in her memory. “‘But you must come and see it for yourselves,’ North was saying. They had asked him to describe Africa. . . . He stopped; it was difficult to describe a place to people who had not seen it.”18 She wondered why this bit of narrative so preoccupied her, why it hovered like a talisman in her mind. Apparently, North’s quiet satisfaction over his recent adventure mirrored her own delight in the life she now led; like him, she found it hard to put the experience into words. But you must come and see it for yourselves. She invited Miss Hearsey to visit her in New York: “Have tea with me before June 1st”—evidently, in Margaret’s Africa certain of the proprieties were still to be observed—“or will your children [the students of Abbot Academy] be having commencement then?”