by Philip Nel
CROCKETT JOHNSON
and
RUTH KRAUSS
Crockett JOHNSON and Ruth KRAUSS
HOW AN UNLIKELY COUPLE
FOUND LOVE,
DODGED THE FBI,
AND TRANSFORMED
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Philip Nel
Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from
Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
Children’s Literature Association Series
www.upress.state.ms.us
Designed by Peter D. Halverson
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association
of American University Presses.
frontis: Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson on their front porch, 1959.
Image courtesy of Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced courtesy of
the New Haven Register.
Copyright © 2012 by Philip Nel
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2012
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nel, Philip, 1969–
Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss : how an unlikely couple found
love, dodged the FBI, and transformed children’s literature / Philip Nel.
p. cm. — (Children’s literature association series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-624-8 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-61703-636-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-61703-625-5 (ebook) 1. Johnson, Crockett, 1906–1975.
2. Krauss, Ruth. 3. Children’s literature, American—History and criticism. I. Title.
PS3519.O224Z77 2012
813’.52—dc23
[B] 2012001106
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
To Karin,
who, for a dozen years, shared her spouse with this book
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Ruth Krauss’s Charmed Childhood
2. Becoming Crockett Johnson
3. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
4. Punching the Clock and Turning Left
5. First Draft
6. Crockett and the Red Crayon
7. “We Met, and That Was It!”
8. Barnaby
9. A Good Man and His Good Wife
10. The Athens of South Norwalk
11. Art and Politics
12. At Home with Ruth and Dave
13. The Big World and the Little House
14. Artists Are to Watch
15. The Art of Collaboration
16. Harold
17. Striking Out into New Areas of Experimentation
18. New Adventures on Page and Screen
19. “Hitting on All 24 Cylinders”
20. Poet in the News, Cartoonist on TV
21. Lorca Variations and Harold’s ABC
22. Provocateur and Philosopher
23. Painting, Passports, and Protest
24. Theorems in Color, Poems on Stage
25. “You’re Only as Old as Other People Think You Are”
26. What Would Harold Do?
27. Life after Dave
28. Children Are to Love
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
CROCKETT JOHNSON
and
RUTH KRAUSS
INTRODUCTION
“Few stories are completely perfect,” said the lion.
“That’s true,” said Ellen, leaving the playroom. “And otherwise it’s a wonderful story. Thank you for telling it to me.”
—CROCKETT JOHNSON, The Lion’s Own Story (1963)
When a stranger knocked on Crockett Johnson’s front door one mild Friday in August 1950, he was not expecting was a visit from the FBI.
Stepping out onto his porch, Johnson spoke with one federal agent while another surreptitiously snapped his photograph. As he stood there politely answering their questions, he had no idea that the bureau had for months been opening his mail, monitoring his bank account, and noting the names of anyone who visited or phoned.1
For the previous five years, Johnson and his wife, Ruth Krauss, had been living quietly in Rowayton, a small coastal community in Norwalk, Connecticut. They had been married for seven years. He was famous for writing Barnaby (1942–52), the epitome of the thinking person’s comic strip. In a few years’ time, he would begin writing what would become his best-known book, Harold and the Purple Crayon. She was gathering material for her eleventh children’s book, A Hole Is to Dig (1952), the classic that launched the career of Maurice Sendak.
Despite (or perhaps because of) their modest acclaim, the FBI had begun keeping tabs on Johnson and Krauss in April 1950. By the time the investigation concluded five years later, the FBI had amassed a file so detailed that it mentioned an interview with the manager of the Baltimore apartment building where Krauss’s mother lived.
Situated at the intersection of art, politics, and commerce, the lives of Krauss and Johnson lead us into a lost chapter in the histories of children’s books, comics, and the American Left. During the McCarthyist 1950s, left-wing artists and writers, shut out of many fields, found success in children’s literature. Only two children’s authors were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and both received no questions about their radical work for children. As a result of her refusal to cooperate with the committee, Helen Kay had her decidedly apolitical Apple Pie for Lewis (1951) banned from U.S. overseas libraries. Questioned by HUAC about a handful of radical poems he wrote for adults in the 1930s, Langston Hughes suddenly faced a huge loss of income two decades later: His publisher, Henry Holt, canceled his contracts, and schools stopped inviting him to speak. He returned to writing for younger readers, creating six books for children. Anticommunist crusaders simply did not see “kiddie lit” as a field important enough to monitor. As left-leaning children’s author Mary Elting Folsom put it, “Our trade was so looked down upon that nobody bothered with us.” Even as the FBI was watching them, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss could and did make a good living writing for children.2
It was a good time to be writing for younger readers: Thanks in part to the baby boom, the American children’s book business was thriving. Between 1950 and 1960, total annual sales nearly tripled, reaching a record high of eighty-eight million dollars in 1960. The decade of Harold and the Purple Crayon and A Hole Is to Dig was also the decade of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking (English translation, 1950), E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952), Kay Thompson’s Eloise (1955), Syd Hoff’s Danny and the Dinosaur (1958), and several Dr. Seuss standards: Horton Hears a Who! (1954), How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957), and The Cat in the Hat (1957). In the 1950s, Leo Lionni, Richard Scarry, Maurice Sendak, and Crockett Johnson debuted as children’s authors. The decade launched careers and classics.3
Two of the decade’s best children’s book creators were also best friends. Theirs was a love story of complementary opposites. Nearly six feet tall and with the build of an ex-football player, Crockett Johnson was a gentle giant, a soft-spoken man with a wry sense of humor. A slender five feet, four inches tall, Ruth Krauss was outspoken and exuberant, an original thinker who nonetheless harbored doubts about her creative gifts. Where Krauss could be anxious, Johnson was always calm. Their backgrounds differed, too. She was a secular Jew from a bourgeois Baltimore family; the son of two immigrants, he
was a lapsed Methodist who grew up in working-class Queens. As Krauss wrote in A Moon or a Button (1959), she and Johnson were two “people on a long winding road and they meet in the middle.”
Between them, they created more than seventy-five books, many of which became classics. Five of Johnson’s seven books about Harold and his purple crayon have remained in print for more than fifty years, and the series has inspired many other books and authors. A May 2010 episode of The Simpsons has Harold draw the opening credits’ couch scene, and Homer tells Harold, “Draw me some beer.” Two-time Caldecott Award winner Chris Van Allsburg thanked “Harold, and his purple crayon” in accepting the Caldecott for Jumanji (1981). Rita Dove, U.S. poet laureate from 1993 to 1995, has written that she could “take the path of Harold’s purple crayon / through the bedroom window and onto a lavender / spill of stars.” In 1995, Michael Tolkin, screenwriter of The Player (1992) and Deep Impact (1998), wrote a screenplay for Harold and the Purple Crayon, a favorite of his and of Spike Jonze, who signed on to direct. Though the film was never made, Jonze went on to direct such inventive and offbeat films as Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2003), and Where the Wild Things Are (2009).4
Harold and the Purple Crayon has captivated so many people because Harold’s crayon not only embodies the imagination but shows that the mind can change the world: What we dream can become real, nothing can become something. The book’s succinct expression of creative possibility tells readers that although they may be subject to forces beyond their control, they can improvise, invent, draw a new path. Many earlier works explored the boundaries between real and imagined worlds—Chuck Jones’s Duck Amuck (1953), Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker cartoons of the early 1950s, René Magritte’s The Human Condition 1 (1933), and Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (2 May 1909), among others. But Johnson distilled this idea into its simplest and most profound form. His Harold lives in the existential uncertainty of the blank canvas: There is no world except that which he makes. A small god in a white romper, Harold uses art to create the heavens and the earth, dragons and apple trees, tall buildings and nine kinds of pie. Explaining why Harold and the Purple Crayon is the children’s art book she recommends above all others, Jackson Pollock biographer Deborah Solomon writes that it suggests that “one well-worn, stubby crayon could allow you to dream up a whole universe. Which of course it can. There’s no better art history lesson than that.”5
Where Johnson’s feeling for a child’s creativity emerged in his artist hero, Ruth Krauss conveyed her respect by bringing real children’s voices into her work and in so doing changed the way authors write for young people. In her Here and Now Storybook (1921), Lucy Sprague Mitchell reproduced child-authored tales in the child’s own words. In A Hole Is to Dig, Krauss went a step further, transforming children’s startling, spontaneous utterances into poetry. Because she treated them as her equals, children accepted Krauss as one of them, confiding in her, telling her stories, or just playing while she watched. She listened, wrote down what they said, and used her poet’s ear to select phrases that displayed a natural, unrehearsed lyricism (“A dream is to look at the night and see things” and “A sea shell is to hear the sea”) or a sense of humor (“Rugs are so dogs have napkins,” “A tablespoon is to eat a table with,” and “Mud is to jump in and slide in and yell doodleedoodleedoo”). Her carefully chosen quotations, juxtaposed with Sendak’s illustrations of scruffy, uninhibited children, helped pave the way for books that respect children’s tough, pragmatic thinking and unorthodox use of language.
Krauss’s influence has been so pervasive as to have become invisible: Contemporary readers take for granted that there have always been vital, spontaneous, loose-tongued children in children’s books. There haven’t. Krauss did not invent these children, but she did give them a place in children’s literature. After her success, everyone else started writing books featuring such children. Some of those authors misread Krauss, finding in her work an occasion for selling sentimental, easily assimilated homilies, such as Joan Walsh Anglund’s Love Is a Special Way of Feeling (1960) and Spring Is a New Beginning (1963). Other authors, however—Kevin Henkes, Lane Smith, and Laurie Keller, to name a few—understood what Krauss was up to. Without sentimentality, she respected what Sendak calls “the natural ferocity of children” and, as Barbara Bader aptly notes, “grasped intuitively what the great Russian children’s poet Kornei Chukovsky spent his life studying, ‘the whimsical and elusive laws of childhood thinking.’” That is why children liked her work and why adult writers of children’s books continue to be influenced by it.6
A favorite of graphic novelists today and of the culturally influential in its day, Johnson’s Barnaby betrays its author’s wide-ranging interests—political satire, popular culture, classic literature, modern art, and mathematics. Its subtle ironies and playful allusions never won a broad following, but the adventures of five-year-old Barnaby Baxter and his bumbling con artist of a fairy godfather were and remain critical favorites. Confessing her love of Barnaby in 1943, Dorothy Parker thought it better than its genre, closer to Mark Twain than to comics: “I suppose you must file Barnaby under comic strips, because his biography runs along in strip form in a newspaper. I bow to convention in the matter. But, privately, if the adventures of Barnaby constitute a comic strip, then so do those of Huckleberry Finn.” While Parker’s low estimation of comics reflects the prejudices of the day, her evocation of a classic American novel still resonates: Barnaby is full of Johnson’s delight in language. Using typeset dialogue, a technique unprecedented in comics, enabled him to include what he estimated to be 60 percent more words, giving Mr. O’Malley more room to indulge in rhetoric that, as one critic put it, combines the “style of a medicine-show huckster with that of Dickens’s Mr. Micawber.”7
Barnaby’s deft balance of fantasy, political commentary, sophisticated wit, and elegantly spare images expanded our sense of what comic strips can do. The missing links between George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913–44) and Walt Kelly’s Pogo (1948–75), Johnson’s Barnaby and Al Capp’s Li’l Abner (1934–77) form the bridge to those idea-driven comics that followed. As a daily topical strip, Li’l Abner precedes Barnaby and exerts its own influence on subsequent satirical strips—especially Pogo and Bloom County (1980–89). But Crockett Johnson’s understated style, keen intellect, and feeling for the imaginary landscape of children all work to place Barnaby in a class by itself. With subtlety and economy, Barnaby proved that comics need not condescend to their readers. Its small but influential readership took that message to heart. As Coulton Waugh noted in his landmark The Comics (1947), Barnaby’s audience may not “compare, numerically, with that of the top, mass-appeal strips. But it is a very discriminating audience, which includes a number of strip artists themselves, and so this strip stands a good chance of remaining to influence the course of American humor for many years to come.” His words were prophetic. Barnaby’s fans have included Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, Family Circus creator Bil Keane, and graphic novelists Daniel Clowes, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware.8
Although Johnson and Krauss were never quite household names, their works were well known from the 1940s through the 1960s. If we measure lives through their influence and intersection with important figures and movements, then these two names deserve to be better remembered today. Their circle of friends and acquaintances included some of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century. Abstract painter Ad Reinhardt and New Yorker cartoonist Mischa Richter were close friends of Johnson’s. Krauss studied anthropology under Margaret Mead and poetry under Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. Harper’s innovative, influential Ursula Nordstrom edited their works and nurtured their unique talents. Johnson, Krauss, and Nordstrom all served as mentors to Sendak.
When referring to Crockett Johnson or Ruth Krauss, I use the name that best suits the situation. Krauss is “Ruth” in a personal context and “Ruth Krauss” or “Krauss” in a public one. Similarly, in public, Johnson is �
��Crockett Johnson” or “Johnson.” In the realm of the personal, Johnson is “Dave” because all of his friends and associates called him by his given name. During the decade it took to write this book, I interviewed more than eighty people, conducted research at more than three dozen archives and special collections, read everything I could find written by or about Johnson and Krauss, and consulted hundreds of additional books and articles to situate their lives in various contexts—historical, cultural, literary, geographical, political. Though this biography draws on those contexts as needed, I have as much as possible structured the book in chronological order.
Crockett Johnson died when I was six years old, by which time I had already read (and loved) Harold and the Purple Crayon. I have often wished that I had persuaded my parents to drive me from our home in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, to the Johnson-Krauss home in Westport, Connecticut, but the idea never occurred to me at the time. And although Ruth Krauss lived for nearly two decades longer, I never met her either. She died just as I was finishing my first year of graduate school, before I became a scholar of children’s literature. Though I am on a first-name basis with Ruth and Dave and I know them intimately, that knowledge derives solely from my research. I wish I had had the chance to know them during their lives.
1
RUTH KRAUSS’S CHARMED CHILDHOOD
There should be a parade when a baby is born.
—RUTH KRAUSS, Open House for Butterflies (1960)
During a midnight storm on 25 July 1901, Ruth Ida Krauss was born. She emerged with a full head of long black hair and her thumb in her mouth. According to Ruth’s birth certificate, twenty-one-year-old Blanche Krauss gave birth at 1025 North Calvert Street, a Baltimore address that did not exist. This future writer of fiction was born in a fictional place. Or so her birth certificate alleges. But it was filed in 1933, at which time the attending physician did live at the above address. Presumably, she was born at 1012 McCulloh, which in 1901 was the doctor’s address and a little over a mile from the Krauss home. Her father, twenty-eight-year-old Julius Leopold Krauss, was in the unusual position of being able to afford to have a doctor attend to his child’s birth—at the turn of the twentieth century, 95 percent of children were born at home, and physicians were present at only 50 percent of births.1
