by Philip Nel
Once a week, Sparber went to the type shop at PM and picked up the type to be pasted into the Barnaby speech balloons, along with galleys of completed but wordless strips, and brought the materials to Darien. Sparber would stay with Krauss and Johnson for two or three days while Johnson wrote a week’s worth of new Barnaby dailies and pasted the words into the galleys of the earlier strips. Because Johnson worked at night, Sparber saw little of him, although “once in a great while, he’d come down and we’d have breakfast together. Then he’d get back upstairs because he was tired—he had to get to sleep in the day.”13
Johnson was also working on a new Barnaby book. As with the first collection, he selected only the best strips, revising and redrawing seven months’ worth of work for inclusion in Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley. Probably aided by his friend Joseph Skelly, a Du Pont Chemical engineer who may have been a model for Atlas, the strip’s slide-rule-carrying “mental giant,” Johnson revised the math formulae in the 26 May 1943 strip, when Atlas meets Barnaby’s fairy godfather but forgets his name. In the original strip, Atlas speaks a mathematically meaningless formula that serves as a mnemonic for O’Malley; in the revised version, however, the formula has meaning:
As J. B. Stroud shows, Euler’s equation demonstrates “that eΠi+1=0.” Simplifying the next component, . Thus far, Atlas’s formula spells out “0 + MA.” Unscrambling the rest of the equation, Stroud proves that The equation thus spells O’Malley, a complex joke comprehensible only to mathematicians. The math professors not only got the joke but used Barnaby strips in their lectures. In late 1948, when Engineering Research Associates got the go-ahead to build a code-breaking computer for the U.S. government, the engineers named the machine Atlas.14
The sophistication was too much for some. In late June 1944, the Baltimore Evening Sun dropped Barnaby because managing editor Miles H. Wolff thought it “had not held up and was getting rather boresome.” The Sun soon found itself flooded by letters demanding the return of Barnaby and his fairy godfather: “A dastardly attack has been made upon the most subtly sophisticated character of our time,” wrote Mary E. O’Malley (who described herself as “no relation!”). “Here at last we have a comic that captures completely the magical world of childhood,” she continued, “where … the adult world is revealed in all its cynical dullness.” Fans signed a petition to restore Barnaby, insisting that the “strip has a genuinely subtle humor which surpasses that of all others found in your publication.” If some readers don’t “appreciate this humor,” that is “insufficient reason for withdrawing it from a newspaper whose aim, we presume, is to please those of all intellectual levels.” A week later, Barnaby returned, with Wolff’s apologies.15
The strip’s subtle political humor gave it a wider appeal than Johnson’s New Masses work. For example, in the fall of 1944, O’Malley expresses his support for Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican nominee in the upcoming presidential election, because “a lot of generals got to be presidents, but, so far, not any ADMIRALS.” Johnson also depicts three ghosts as strong Dewey supporters: One of the ghosts, Colonel Wurst, is named for two anti-Roosevelt and isolationist newspaper owners, Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal-American and several other papers. Wurst introduces another ghost, A.A., as “able to give us the direct, uncolored view of a ‘Man in the Street,’” but when A.A. advises Barnaby, “Sell short, young fellow, sell short,” it becomes clear that he is not a “Man in the Street” but an investor. Implying that Dewey’s supporters are deluded by nostalgia, Johnson has Colonel Wurst printing progressively earlier newspapers. One from 31 October proclaims “Peace in Our Time” (Chamberlain’s defense of the Munich agreement, September 1938), and by 7 November 1944, the clock has been turned back to before the 1929 stock market crash: The ghosts stroll off, singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Johnson thus mocks without offending: As the Bridgeport Sunday Herald’s Ethel Beckwith observed in October 1944, “Nobody gets mad. Readers of both parties think they are slyer than the cartoonist in making it out for their side.”16
Crockett Johnson, page from Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley (New York: Holt, 1944). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 8 September 1944. Image courtesy of Rosebud Archives. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 29 September 1944. Image courtesy of Rosebud Archives. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Johnson, however, remained a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection, lending both his name and his artwork to the Artists Committee for the President’s Birthday and to the Independent Voters Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt (IVCASR). To promote FDR’s campaign, IVCASR published a twenty-two-page booklet containing the text of FDR’s 23 September 1944 speech to the Teamsters Union with illustrations by nineteen progressive artists. In the address, Roosevelt commented about recent Republican criticism, “Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks and my family don’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them.” Fala was the president’s Scotch terrier, and when he learned that “the Republican fiction writers in Congress” had alleged that Roosevelt had sent a destroyer to fetch the dog, “his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.” Hugo Gellert drew a heroic portrait of FDR, William Gropper caricatured Republican opponents of the New Deal, Lynd Ward offered a heroic image of the American factory worker making airplanes, and Syd Hoff showed the common man donating a dollar to FDR while a fat capitalist gives a big sack of money to Dewey. Crockett Johnson drew a portrait of an indignant Fala.17
Crockett Johnson, illustrations from “Sister, You Need the Union! … And the Union Needs You!” (United Auto Workers–CIO pamphlet, 1944). Images courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Earlier in 1944, Johnson illustrated a United Auto Workers–CIO pamphlet, “Sister, You Need the Union! … And the Union Needs You!,” that reminded women to get involved with their union and to help themselves by helping the union “make a better world.” It concluded by advising, “Get Busy in the CIO Political Action Campaign. Register and Vote!” Enlisting O’Malley in support of the war effort, Johnson also devised slogans for a War Bond display window in Lewis and Conger, a New York department store.18
Holt published Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley in September 1944 to mixed response. Even reviewers who praised the first volume now struggled to classify Johnson’s comic strip. Isabelle Mallet of the New York Times, who had called Barnaby “a series of comic strips which, laid end to end, reach from here to wherever you want to go before you die” and who found the new book engaging, could not find the right words to “pay suitable tribute. We might just as well try to fasten the Nobel Prize on a rainbow.” In Booklist, proletarian novelist Jack Conroy, whose first children’s book, a collaboration with Arna Bontemps, had appeared in 1942, concluded that Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley had “adult and adolescent appeal, rather than juvenile, but the book might be used with older children as a substitute for comic books.” Commonweal reviewed the book in a section devoted to works for “the very young.” Its review was equally confused: “Appeals to readers of all ages, though it is a rather special taste. Some like it and some do not.”19
“Can’t Sleep?—Try Mr. O’Malley’s Famous Sleep Remedy. Appease Your Conscience. Buy More Bonds.” Window display at Lewis and Conger, New York, October 1944. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Johnson was also working on the final artwork for The Carrot Seed. Nordstrom thought the little boy “perfect in most of the pictures” but felt he “shouldn’t look surp
rised or doubtful in any of” them because he needs a “sense of sublime assurance throughout.” Johnson agreed with the suggestion and “fixed … up” the boy’s expression. He gave precise instructions to the printers to ensure that the book’s colors were exactly right: brown, red, green, and light cream, though he was not completely sure about the last one. “Omit Light Cream?,” he wrote on the chart. The printers did, and yellow appeared in the final book.20
A week after he sent in the final changes to the Carrot Seed illustrations, Dave and Ruth took the train into New York City, where, at the Hotel Commodore Ballroom, they attended a dinner honoring Johnson’s New Masses colleague William Gropper on his forty-seventh birthday. Sponsored by the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, the dinner featured remarks from Dorothy Parker, Carl Sandburg, and radio broadcaster Norman Corwin. In addition to Johnson, the sixty-five sponsors listed on the program included conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein; composers Aaron Copeland and Earl Robinson; lyricist E. Y. Harburg; artists Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Rockwell Kent, Boardman Robinson, Louis Slobodkin, and William Steig; novelists W. Somerset Maugham and Howard Fast; screenwriter John Howard Lawson; and Paul Robeson.21
At around the same time, a coalition including some of Johnson’s New Masses friends formed the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, and by February 1945, Johnson had joined the group. Taylor was a black Alabama woman who had been gang-raped by six white men in September 1944. Although local law enforcement could identify the men, they were not charged with the crime. Though much less famous than the Scottsboro Boys case thirteen years earlier, Taylor’s plight highlighted persistent racial injustice in Alabama, an issue that Johnson also took up in Barnaby. In November 1943, O’Malley had been elected to Congress, and a March 1944 strip had him telling Barnaby about Representative Rumpelstilskin, a blowhard who supports the poll tax, offering “incoherent shrieks about states’ rights” as a result of his “neurosis.” According to O’Malley, Representative “Rump” is “elected by only 2½ per cent of the people in his district. Other congressmen get eleven times his vote. Representing a minority group, he feels he doesn’t amount to very much.” The National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax subsequently used this Barnaby strip in its campaign.22
Barnaby was poised for greater success. In March 1944, George Pal, creator of the Puppetoons animated movies, sought to adapt the comic strip for a short film. Johnson had already begun collaborating on a musical version of Barnaby with Ted and Matilda Ferro, residents of Cos Cob, Connecticut, who were also writing the radio serial Lorenzo Jones. For the music, they enlisted Harold J. Rome, author of the music and lyrics for Pins and Needles, a Popular Front Broadway musical about love and labor in the garment industry. Neither project came to fruition, but by the middle of 1944, a new creative team began adapting Barnaby for the stage.23
The producer behind the new venture was Barney Josephson, proprietor of Café Society, a progressive and integrated New York nightclub where the bartenders were Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans and where Billie Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit.” For the book, Josephson brought in Michael Kanin, who had won an Academy Award in 1942 for Woman of the Year, which starred Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. When Kanin’s Hollywood career prevented him from working on Barnaby, Josephson sought New Yorker humorist S. J. Perelman. For the lyrics, Josephson enlisted John LaTouche, lyricist for “Ballad for Americans” (1940), the unofficial anthem of the Popular Front. Jimmy Savo, one of the inspirations for Mr. O’Malley, signed on to play Barnaby’s fairy godfather.24
This success gave Dave enough income to buy a home, and in February 1945, he purchased a house in Rowayton, directly across the Five Mile River from the Darien house he and Ruth had been renting. Located at 74 Rowayton Avenue, on the corner of Crockett Street, the house faced the water. He also bought the land on the other side of Rowayton Avenue so that he could moor his boat at the dock across the street.25
That spring, Harper published The Carrot Seed, which Ruth privately called The Toinip Top. The book was an immediate hit. Kirkus called it a “good humored tale” and noted that “the publishers, in choosing Crockett Johnson, creator of Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley, as illustrator, have picked the ideal person for the job.” The New York Times Book Review’s Ellen Lewis Buell thought it a “parable” that would appeal to old and young alike, “portrayed in pictures that are economical of line as the text is with words.” It quickly became a phenomenon.26
One admirer sent a copy of The Carrot Seed to the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, where representatives from fifty countries would sign the United Nations charter that June. In August, the president of an engineering firm sent out one hundred copies to executives in many fields, who in turn sought copies to send to their colleagues and employees. The Catholic Church put The Carrot Seed on its list of recommended reading, conveying the message, “Have faith and you’ll get results.” A neighbor of Ruth and Dave’s thought it a “swell book” with a great moral: “Never trust anybody, not even your parents.” The book’s openness to a range of interpretations was key to its success.27
In the fall, Dave and Ruth moved into their own home, where they would reside for the next twenty-seven years, creating many more classic books. First, however, they would need to learn to cope with their own success.
10
THE ATHENS OF SOUTH NORWALK
I’ll admit, Barnaby, at times I nourish misgivings about the entire venture.
—MR. O’MALLEY, in Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 9 April 1945
Crockett Johnson’s success brought financial security—and more work. People wrote to request original strips, ask him to donate artwork to various causes, and inquire if they might reprint Barnaby comics. Editors found Barnaby very useful for illustrating concepts.
To highlight the need to educate the public about statistics, the American Statistical Association Bulletin chose a Barnaby in which O’Malley misuses statistical methods, “fitting the data to the curve” instead of using the data to plot the curve. For a report on the wartime scarcity of cigarettes, a December 1944 Advertising Age uses a strip in which O’Malley suggests that “advertising writers” are responsible for the tobacco shortage: “They never write about anything but the FINEST tobaccos. And the superlatives can be applied to only about one percent of the crop,” leaving “ninety-nine percent of the tobacco … utterly wasted!” To accompany an article on daytime radio serials illustrated by Saul Steinberg, the March 1946 Fortune ran Dave’s 30 January 1945 comic, in which Barnaby points to a radio broadcasting the words “Sob. Sob. Sob.” He observes, “This lady sounds just like the ones on all the other programs, Mr. O’Malley.” His godfather explains that this is “a very stylized art form,” but the “tiny nuances writers and actors are permitted to inject” serve as “the basis of the devotee’s esthetic enjoyment.” To display the best of the nation’s popular culture, the U.S. Office of War Information asked for six Barnaby cartoons to feature in a spring 1945 exhibition of American cartoons in Paris. Johnson sent six original strips.1
Adapting Barnaby for the stage was proving trickier than anticipated, and changes in script, writers, and cast threatened to delay production. Barnaby did, however, make its radio debut on 12 June 1945. On the second half of that day’s Frank Morgan Show, Morgan (best known for portraying the title character in MGM’s Wizard of Oz) played O’Malley, and seven-year-old Norma Jean Nilsson played Barnaby. No further episodes aired. At the same time, Johnson was cranking out six Barnaby strips each week, imprisoned by his own perfectionism: “I never feel that I can let down. If I did, the stuff wouldn’t get to be just mediocre; it would be terrible.” Thinking that quarterly deadlines might allow him to take some time off, he sought “to do strips that were syndicated only in quarterlies.” The first issue of the Barnaby Quarterly made its debut in July 1945, reprinting Barnaby’s adventures from the first five months of the year.2
Crockett Johnson posing
with the Barnaby strip of 22 April 1944. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Ruth Krauss had more time to think but was out of ideas. Even before The Carrot Seed was published, she had begun contemplating next her book but found herself uninspired. She rummaged through “some cartons full of old manuscripts” that she kept “in honor of an occasion like this” and pulled out on story about a boy who imagines that he’s a superhero. But “the story was around ten thousand words long,” far too long for a picture book, and although “the idea seemed clear, … it needed a lot of rewriting.”3
Krauss rewrote the story over and over but was not satisfied. She noticed that when she told the story to friends, they laughed. To try to capture that comic tone, she decided to write the story the same way that she spoke it. Pleased with her inspiration, she took the manuscript to Ursula Nordstrom at Harper, who laughed and immediately said, “I’ll take it.” She wanted some changes, though. She thought it should be “built up” here and there, and although it was now only fifteen hundred words, Nordstrom thought it was still too long.4
