The Werewolf series on classic children’s books continues this week with the bedtime favourite Goodnight Moon, and the brief life of the tragic genius who wrote it.
Right up until the final editorial meeting on Goodnight Moon, it was unclear whether the central character would be a rabbit or – if the illustrator Clement Hurd had his way – a human child, perhaps a black child. Partly because Hurd was better at drawing rabbits than he was at drawing human beings, a rabbit child ended up being in the big bed, in the great green room.
Goodnight Moon is the most famous of the many, many books written by Margaret Wise Brown. During her brief and tumultuous life, Brown revolutionised the field of children’s literature. To some extent, this came down to her sheer energy and output. Between 1937 and her death in 1952, Brown poured out a torrent of over 90 books, and at one point had five publishing houses struggling to keep up with her. Brown wrote for the very young, and the simplicity of her writing is easy to disparage, but very hard to emulate.
“At first I read her stories and thought: ‘There’s nothing much to this,’ the illustrator Daphov Ipcar once wrote. ‘But as I studied the text, I began to see how carefully she had selected just the right word, with just the right poetic feeling, and how beautifully she had woven her ideas and words together.’ Well, exactly.
There is an almost narcotic quality to the rhythms of a typical Margaret Wise Brown story. Often, her books deal with the child’s first attempts at exploration and independence, and finish with a reassuring flight back to security. The repetitions and most of all, the dreamy ambience have made Brown’s books perfect for bed-time reading – and re-reading – for well over half a century. Even wild things need to sleep.
Finally, it must be said, Brown’s early impact also owed a lot to her striking beauty, vivacity and air of vulnerability. Bruce Bliven, the writer of a December 1946 profile in Life magazine was clearly smitten with this ‘tall, green-eyed, ash blonde,’ and with her languid explanation that she spent most of her money on ‘clothes, champagne and flowers.’
In her diary, Clement Hurd’s wife Edith (also an artist) wrote that Brown coming to visit was like the advent of a stimulating but exhausting celestial being: “Clem and I always said that whichever one of us was not collaborating with her would have to pacify the one who was. After her departure, we would be exhausted and sleep for days, and then have food for thought for weeks to come.” Brown was, Edith Hurd concluded, the closest thing to a genius that she ever met.
Her early death, in tragic circumstances, has merely enhanced the legend.
Margaret Wise Brown was born in 1910, the daughter of a wealthy US captain of manufacturing. Her grandfather Benjamin Grantz Brown had been a notable free thinker, a governor of Missouri and the 1872 vice-presidential candidate for what was at the time, a liberal Republican Party.
After a boarding school stint in Switzerland and her parents’ divorce, Brown finished an arts degree in English. As a trainee teacher in New York, she then became the protege of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, a famed researcher in child development who had founded an experimental school of education in Greenwich Village, in order to put her theories into action.
It is hard these days to realise just what a revolution Mitchell and Brown set in motion. Beforehand, as Edith Hurd said, children’s literature had been largely a field of fairy tales, folklore, adventure yarns and sentimental stories about things whimsically, and fabulously, unreal.
Through Mitchell, Brown became convinced of the need to respect the integrity of the child’s own world – and to treat the child as a little empiricist, engaged in naming and exploring the ‘here and now’ of his or her own experience. Through the process of reading books with their parents, children were to be respected as full partners in the process of learning. Sometimes, Brown and her colleagues would test market their early drafts on children, note their responses and adjust the text accordingly.
Like many wealthy young women before and since, Brown got a job in publishing in New York, in a small publishing house set up to market the products of Mitchell’s theories. In short order, the ‘here and now’ movement produced a flood of stories about tugboats, fire engines, ditch diggers and the like, all grounded in the sights, sounds, reasoning and language patterns of the child.
To some extent, Brown had also been strongly influenced by the repetitive, modernist prose of Gertrude Stein. As a young editor, Brown had asked several famous writers (including Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck) to try their hand at writing a book for children. Only Gertrude Stein seriously took up the challenge. The result was a book called The World Is Round, which is still in print. Some critics have claimed the old female rabbit in the great green room in Goodnight Moon was a homage to Stein.
In her personal life, Brown was a mess of contradictions. ‘She combined so many childlike qualities within herself,’ Leonard Weisgard once wrote, ‘and under a veneer of sophistication, that she often seemed a total paradox.’ Yes, she was a modern, independent woman – but also one whose earnings were always being topped up with money provided by her father.
Blessed with great insight into how children think and respond, she had no children of her own. Though she wrote stories about bunnies, her favourite sport was beagling, in which a pack of hounds would tear a jackrabbit to shreds. ‘I won’t let anyone get away with anything,’ she told Bliven laconically in the Life magazine profile, ‘just because he is small.’
For seven years during her 30s, Brown had a turbulent affair with a failed actress and poet called Michael Strange, the pen name of Blanche Oelrichs, the ex-wife of the actor John Barrymore. Brown felt that Strange – who was 20 years older – was a far greater talent whose poetry, Brown felt, was far more deserving of attention than her own small prose efforts for children.
Strange proved to be adept at manipulating Brown’s insecurity. For several reasons, it is a bit harrowing to read Awakened by the Moon, the Leonard Marcus biography of Brown. Clearly, Marcus didn’t much approve of his subject, her bohemian ways and her very, very bad spelling. As one reviewer said, couldn’t Marcus just accept that she couldn’t spell to save herself, and leave it at that?
The biographer’s sternly sensible tone only makes the letters that Brown (who sometimes called herself Bun) wrote to Strange (the worldly-wise woman whom she nick-named Rab) seem even more melancholy. For example :
Anyway Rab, the Bun will try to be very steady, and clear-headed and orderly and chic, and maybe some day someone will love it for its shiny shoes and its tender heart and forgive the mercuric change of mood, which is more Celtic than me, and is born out of climates and races and oceans that are older than memory, and that can no more change than the varying rhythms of the sea…
There is also this letter which, as others have noted, is a classic example of someone trying to will herself into believing that her lover still contains the virtues originally seen in her – and even worse, that this fidelity, despite all evidence to the contrary, will somehow one day be rewarded:
Michael, I have listened to you harder than to anyone in the world and I have heard you. I still listen, and I still hear you. And if my life ever makes any sense who you are even more than what you say will not be lost in me, or in what I write. I believe in you. And I see you, too, being greedy child and pristine child, ruthless pig and generous by your quickness, as few could be. I have seen your self confidence the size of a mouse and the size of an elephant and have seen you in between, and apart from all fluctuations of confidence, love or hate. For Michael is greater than Michael.
During the last few months of her life, Brown met and fell in love with Jay Rockefeller, a younger man who seems to have been devoted to her. The couple became engaged.
However, while on a publicity tour of France in 1952, Brown fell ill with appendicitis. After routine surgery, her doctor came around and asked her how she was. Great, Brown replied – and demonstrated with a can-can high kick that dislodged an embolism that killed her almost instantly. She was 42 years old.
In the light of Goodnight Moon
By general consensus, Goodnight Moon was her masterpiece. Marcus was right on the money when he wrote: ‘In Goodnight Moon, Brown was able to convey as well as anyone has, a young child’s liquid view of the world as a place both near at hand and vast beyond measure, toy bright yet shadow tinged, comfortingly familiar yet at times fantastically strange.’ Again, Marcus was right to praise Hurd for the subtle changes in perspective that Hurd creates as he guides us through the remarkably confined location. After all, this is an entire picture book that radically, is set in just one room.
While it has become a cultural landmark, the book took a strange path to that status. On release in 1947, it was a solid but not overwhelming success. For reasons still largely unknown, the book’s popularity suddenly began to accelerate from 1953 onwards. Since Brown had died the year before, this meant she never suspected the success that her book has since enjoyed.
Her will reflected as much. With no children and no big amounts of money seemingly at stake, Brown had whimsically decided to bequeath all of the royalties from her books to Albert Clarke III, a boy in her neighbourhood. At the time of her death, Albert was the cherubic nine year old son of Joan McCormick, one of her friends from the early days in Greenwich Village.
As the earnings from Goodnight Moon in particular increased from a few hundred dollars a year to thousands, to an economic colossus now worth millions, the fortunes of the lucky heir and the famous book have diverged with what Joshua Prager called “ strange symmetry’ in this disturbing article in the Wall Street Journal in 2000.
As the fame and financial value of Goodnight Moon increased, Albert Clarke III’s life just as steadily dis-integrated :
“I’m an inept bungler when it comes to business matters,” Mr. Clarke says, as ash drops from his cigarette into the folds of his trousers. “If it wasn’t for the fact that Margaret Wise Brown left me an inheritance, who knows? I could’ve been a homeless person. I could’ve been a poor, broken-down homeless person…. I just remember this beautiful, proud, noble looking lady,” Mr. Clarke says. ‘She looked extraordinary.’
Albert’s extensive criminal rap sheet came to include convictions for vagrancy, drug possession, and burglary that resulted in a brief period in prison. He died in 2018 at the age of 74. Thanks to US copyright law, Goodnight, Moon will keep on generating hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in royalties for Albert’s four children, until 2043.
Moonshadows
Despite and maybe because of all of her bad choices and inconsistencies, Brown remains an immensely likeable figure. It is too much to expect that anyone, at 42, would have tied up all the loose ends in their life. There’s always the stuff left unsaid and undone. Brown said as much in another remarkable letter she wrote to Strange, on one of the many occasions when her lover was ill, and being demanding:
I know why now, parents keep telling their children to keep warm, and get fat and not to get wet. It is all they can say to express something, poor devils. And yet the Rabbit poet in me has always longed for another language before it is too late – a more fearless boldness of the heart, to say the things we never say, and the other never knows.
Previously: The Moomins by Tove Jansson, Badger’s Parting Gifts by Susan Varley
Next Friday is the Budget aftermath. The next children’s classics entry (on Friday June 5th) will be The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford