by Philip Nel
As Barnaby headed for the stage and possibly the screen, Ruth Krauss worked on a children’s book that would use anthropology to debunk stereotypes, echoing the approach of The Races of Mankind, which United Productions of America had adapted into a successful cartoon, The Brotherhood of Man, the preceding year. Ruth’s first chapter, “On Women,” noted that for Africa’s Dahomey people, “Women form one third of standing army”; among the Bathonga, “Women are the great story-tellers.” The second chapter, “On Men,” reported that in Manus society, “men tend the babies,” while the Tchambuli see men as having “the flighty character.” Her fourth chapter was explicitly anti-ageist. Chapters 3 and 5 countered dominant assumptions about humanity. Hoping to prove that killing was not a “natural” part of human behavior, she pointed out that among the Todas, “there no record of any murder” and that certain Australian peoples had never had war. Having just seen the second world war in three decades, Krauss was drawn to the idea that a better future began with the next generation. With proper education, these children might grow into adults less inclined to pursue war as a means of resolving differences.7
Tommy Hamilton meets the character he portrays on stage. PM, 1946. Image courtesy of Thomas Hamilton.
The fall of 1946 saw the publication of The Great Duffy to generally good reviews. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Florence Little thought that the book would entertain children, citing one young reader who judged it as good as Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937). Marjorie Fischer’s New York Times review called the book “the child’s equivalent of ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.’” Kirkus agreed that the book’s “adventures … catch the ‘Walter Mitty touch.’” Praising the book’s “imaginative understanding of real small boy psychology,” the review considered The Great Duffy a “delectable book for the distracted parent who wants to wean small sons from too constant demand for comics.” However, the book was “‘banned’ by the Child Study Association, who even refused to take ads from Harper.”8
The production of Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley continued to be plagued by problems, many of them related to its costly special effects, which included making O’Malley fly out over the audience. The play was late opening in Wilmington and was staged only twice there before moving on to Baltimore; the planned weeklong run there ended when the production closed for repairs after just two shows. Josephson and Proctor remained convinced that Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley was “a potential hit” but conceded that it “needs revision.” A lot of money had already been invested in the show—forty-four backers had contributed more than eighty thousand dollars. The producers dismissed the director and spent twelve weeks to reworking the play, hoping to open in New York before Christmas. Johnson had been only minimally involved in adapting Barnaby for the stage, and though he was not happy about being left out, had held his tongue, wanting to give the producers some “aesthetic autonomy.” Now that the show had flopped, however, he offered his assistance. Josephson accepted, assuring Johnson that he would work closely with Chodorov on the revised version.9
With Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley in limbo, Dave and Ruth took a vacation, driving to New Orleans and then flying to Mexico. They spent a few days in a “little jungle” in the Yucatán, enjoying the warm weather, fresh fruit, and spicy food. Back home, Johnson continued his political activities. At the end of December 1946, he had been a delegate to the joint convention of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions and the National Citizens Political Action Committee. The two groups voted to merge, creating the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA). In June 1947, he and Mischa Richter organized a PCA-sponsored reception for secretary of commerce and former vice president Henry Wallace in Westport, Connecticut.10
While her husband was preparing for Wallace’s visit, Krauss was working on another book, “Mr. Littleguy and the Laundry.” Ursula Nordstrom at Harper had turned down a draft, and Krauss again sought help from the Bank Street Writers Laboratory. The group generally liked the tale, which involved a laundryman who prefers to “paint little pictures on clothes instead of just conventional laundry marks.” Some customers complain, but others like the pictures, and his shirts eventually cause a sensation in the art world. Though the members of the Bank Street group “thought the writing was not too rough,” Krauss disagreed: “I know they’re wrong.” Krauss pushed her doubts aside and sent the new version to Simon and Schuster, which replied that the story would not suit the Little Golden Books series. The editors encouraged her to send in a revised version, and Krauss worked on it some more and again sent it to Nordstrom. Yet another rejection followed: Nordstrom declared the story too “noisy” and suggested that Krauss write another story featuring the central character. A discouraged Krauss abandoned Mr. Littleguy and resurrected “The Last of the Mad Waffles,” a chapter of a novel about the Depression that she thought might be adaptable into a story for children.11
Johnson turned his attention to Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley, working in Rowayton on plot, staging, and production ideas and lining up a Manhattan apartment so that he could come down to New York and work on the play with Chodorov. However, Chodorov had arranged with Josephson and Proctor to turn the project over to Kay Van Riper, screenwriter for Busby Berkeley’s Babes in Arms (1939) and a half dozen Andy Hardy movies. Johnson did not learn of the change until he received a note requesting his signature on some legal documents during the first half of 1947. He sent an irate telegram to the producers and hopped on a train to New York. He obtained a copy of the script just an hour before meeting with the producers and Van Riper. Van Riper stuck with the project for only a few months before dropping it, and the producers gave up. Again, however, they neglected to tell Johnson. Although Johnson’s involvement with the play had been minimal, some investors blamed him for its failure. He asked Josephson to correct this impression and in a rare display of anger told him that the producers and Jerome Chodorov had managed “the most offensive personal and professional insult ever callously and deliberately inflicted on a writer” and the most “fantastically irresponsible treatment ever accorded a literary creation.”12
As Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley slowly imploded, Johnson began to think about other projects. He dropped in to see William Sloane, former vice president of Henry Holt and Company, publisher of the first two Barnaby books, who in 1946 had founded a new publishing house, William Sloane Associates. While waiting to see Sloane, Johnson began to read one of the company’s latest novels, Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think (1947), a gonzo satire of public apathy, bureaucratic incompetence, government hypocrisy, and media appetite for disaster. Johnson told Sloane, “Say, this is the kind of book I like,” and that fall, those words appeared at the top of a full-page advertisement in the New York Times Book Review. Johnson’s name still carried a certain cultural cache. As Coulton Waugh wrote in The Comics, published the same year, Barnaby’s “very discriminating audience” would likely “influence the course of American humor for years to come.” “Underlying [Barnaby’s] fantasy” was a “sharp, razor-edge of social satire,” and the strip provided “a patch of cheerful, sunny green in the scorched-dust color of our times.”13
Dave and Ruth were now living comfortably in Rowayton. By the summer of 1947, they had purchased the first TV in town, and Fred Schwed, George Annand, and other friends frequently dropped in to watch tennis, boxing, baseball, and football. With martinis and snacks at their fingertips, the blinds pulled down to keep out the sun, and the TV showing their favorite games, it was, according to Schwed, “a good way to spend the summer in the big outdoors.”14
That summer, the daily Barnaby strip created by Jack Morley and Ted Ferro began to drift from its original premise. The topical satire became less sharp, and O’Malley’s diction lost some of its lexicographical exuberance. Following a misunderstanding during which Mr. Baxter threatens to shoot Mr. O’Malley, Barnaby’s fairy godfather leaves the narrative from 24 May through 1 July, by far his longest
absence from the series. Much of Barnaby’s particular style had come from Johnson, and Ferro was simply not Johnson. Johnson returned to writing the strip in September 1947, though Morley stayed on to do the art, and the two men worked jointly on the strip until 1952. Johnson wrote the dialogue, planned the layout, and often provided Morley with rough sketches to use as guides. For the remainder of Barnaby’s run, Johnson remained actively involved in the strip’s creation.15
Harper released Krauss’s The Growing Story, illustrated by Phyllis Rowand, in 1947 to complimentary reviews predicting that child readers would identify with the protagonist. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, May Lamberton Becker said, “If the five-year-old for whom you are choosing a story is like others of his age he finds the rate of his own growth a matter of warm interest.” The New York Times’s Lillian Gerard wrote, “The phenomenon of growth, combined with a child’s interest in himself, makes this a fascinating story, easy to read aloud and discuss.” Kirkus noted that the “author of some of our very favorite juveniles … has again given us a satisfying, lovely text that will get repeated reading from four to six year olds” and described Rowand’s drawings as “modern and stylized without sacrifice of a certain tenderness.”16
Frequently asked why she never had children, Ruth often answered that she knew that she was not responsible enough to be a parent. This may be true: Ruth found it easy to talk to children because she was so like a child; her emotional receptiveness to young people’s experiences made her a good friend to children but might not have made her a successful mother. In any case, Ruth and Dave did not need to have a child of their own. They had Nina Rowand Wallace, who was like a daughter to them. And they had the children of their imaginations. Dave had Barnaby. Ruth had Duffy and the unnamed protagonists of The Carrot Seed and The Growing Story. Many of the greatest creators of children’s literature—Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Margaret Wise Brown, Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, and James Marshall—had no biological children. In a practical sense, time not spent on raising children could instead be devoted to writing for children; however, childlessness meant that these authors had to find inspiration elsewhere. Crockett Johnson drew on his memories of his childhood. Ruth Krauss looked to folklore, to imagined conversations with neighbors, and to unpublished work for adults. Though all three methods brought her success, she had not yet found a reliable muse. She had not yet realized that her best source of ideas might be children themselves.
12
AT HOME WITH RUTH AND DAVE
On a piece of paper
I write it
On my looking-glass
And on snow
I write it
—RUTH KRAUSS, I Write It (1970)
For Ruth Krauss, the harsh 1947–48 winter brought writer’s block. Through the middle of December, the temperature had been a bit warmer than usual, but on the 26th, two feet of snow blanketed Rowayton, the beginning of a three-month stretch when New England received twice as much snow as usual. By February, Krauss found it difficult to write, a situation for which she blamed William James, although she mixed him up with Henry: “It must have been Henry because according to my present figuring William is the fictionist (I know I should know which is who and all but the fact remains that except for this figuring out loud, I off hand do not).” William James (not the fiction-ist) disliked being interrupted when inspiration struck, anxious that he would lose his creative spark. She took his words to heart, and since then, Krauss explained, “I’ve spent a lot of time seizing on the impulse divine. I have stopped all and sundry—in fact, I stop everything still. I hide, I seek, I lure, I pretend I’m alone … to insulate myself, in order to carry out the creative urge because this James guy told me off at an early age.” As a result, “I have got so I really find I write best only when ‘inspired,’ in fact that [I] otherwise cannot write at all.” In the winter doldrums, sitting around waiting for inspiration was a poor strategy.1
To get started, Krauss borrowed an idea from a friend, possibly Nancy Goldsmith, who “planned to write three pages a day, in this way getting her ‘novel’ done.” From late February to late March, Krauss sat at her Remette typewriter nearly every day and wrote a few pages. If she kept typing, she reasoned, she would eventually come up with something she could publish— she could do “a lot of cutting and then a lot of building up the places where interesting subject matter comes in.” If that plan failed, then “maybe it can be of value just as a historical document.” The resulting 123-page manuscript is precisely that, providing a glimpse into Ruth and Dave’s daily lives, their relationship, and Krauss’s aspirations.2
Krauss titled the piece “Where Am I Going?,” reflecting her uncertainty about the direction her professional life was taking. She was not earning a living from writing children’s books, and Ursula Nordstrom had rejected Krauss’s most recent efforts. Hoping to publish an old novel manuscript, Krauss sent it off to be retyped. Thinking that she might publish her work in magazines, she composed an article about the writing of The Great Duffy. She worried that her life lacked focus.3
Movies provided her with welcome distraction. When reading a novel, Krauss tended to get bored by the details about a quarter of the way in, skip to the ending, and then put the book aside. But movies were her “own special form of almost (infantile) secret pleasure”: “I … like to just slump in the dark with my feet propped up on the back of the seat in front.” Krauss had recently overcome her fears and learned to drive, though she did so only during daylight hours and close to home. Either alone or with Phyllis Rowand, Krauss would drive to Stamford, do some shopping, and see a movie. She described Red Skelton’s Merton of the Movies as “very funny and also pathetic in parts,” but on a weekend trip to New York City, Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique; ou, Les Quatre Saisons, a symbolic film about rural post–World War II France, sent her straight to sleep.4
In New York, she and Dave had “a sublet of a sublet.” On winter Fridays, they would take the train into the city for the weekend. There, they would see publishers, go to parties, and visit friends such as Herman and Nina Schneider, left-leaning authors of many science books for children, and anthropologist Gitel Poznanski and painter Bob Steed, both of whom had traveled with Ruth on the Blackfeet expedition nine years earlier. Ruth could not stay awake through all these visits. After dinner one night with Dave, Poznanski, Steed, and psychologist Al Leighton, the author of The Navajo Door, which Ruth was reading, narcolepsy began to overtake her. Poznanski led Ruth to a bed in the next room, where she slept for an hour. The next night, at a party on Riverside Drive, Ruth fell asleep in a comfortable chair and dreamed of eating with chopsticks and then pulling paper toweling from a roll over her head. She found her dreams interesting but baffling: “If there is any significance anyone can find in these things, kindly communicate and the finder will be rewarded by I don’t know what.”5
Back in Rowayton, Ruth’s mind veered toward her fear of fire, which had resurfaced just after she and Dave moved to Connecticut. One afternoon, looking across the Five Mile River at the street where she and Dave had lived a few years earlier, Ruth saw Bob and Helen McNell’s house on fire and immediately phoned to tell them. During the winter of 1947–48, two more houses in the neighborhood caught fire, both “on nights of great snow around three thirty a.m.” The sirens woke Ruth, and looking out an upstairs window, she saw “the fires flaming up and coloring everything, and the sparks flying in the wind out over all the other houses and the weeds.” She and Dave dressed and went outside to join other neighbors. They could do little except “keep watch on the sparks” to see that the fire did not spread. These fires stirred memories of the Great Baltimore Fire of her youth, but Ruth tried to reassure herself that her anxieties were irrational: She did not worry about fire while staying in New York, and they had already had the Rowayton house’s furnace inspected and cleaned.6
But another night, Ruth woke up at 4:00 in the morning to a strange smell. She “thought immediately of f
ire, and specifically of the furnace.” Not wanting to wake Dave, who had come to bed only two hours earlier, she went to investigate. The smell, “pungent, … like strong urine, and slightly smoky,” led her to the basement door. When she opened it, the odor hit her “full blast,” but she saw no smoke. She pondered what to do before walking slowly down the stairs. Despite the absence of smoke, she turned off the furnace, and she subsequently determined that the smell seemed to be coming from the boiler. Nothing appeared amiss, but she woke Dave anyway, and the two of them “sniffed all around” their cellar. Dave concluded, “It must be a skunk,” but Ruth remained worried. Ruth went back to bed and Dave offered to “sit up and finish some work and ‘keep watch’” so that she could finish her night’s sleep.7
