Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss

by Philip Nel

  Johnson also began to explore writing for children. He had witnessed Krauss’s success as a children’s author, and he decided to try his hand at it. The job of children’s book creator would surely be less demanding than turning out a daily comic strip, right? In 1952, William R. Scott published the first children’s book written and illustrated by Crockett Johnson: Who’s Upside Down? The story is a parable of perception in which a kangaroo picks up a geography book, sees herself in Australia, and exclaims, “I’m down underneath and upside down! … It certainly seems to be so!” Johnson’s narrator explains, “When a thing seems to be so, kangaroos usually hop to the conclusion that it is so.” Although the book contains no explicit reference to McCarthyism, Johnson gently debunks the kangaroo’s tendency to jump to conclusions. Contemporary reviewers detected no such subtext and praised the book. In the words of the New York Times Book Review’s Lois Palmer, Johnson “tackles the question of gravity and … gives an easy-to-grasp answer…. Children will be delighted with the mother kangaroo who gets all mixed up on the subject and with the baby kangaroo’s proof that she is always right side up.”24

  Despite such favorable reviews, Who’s Upside Down? was not a big commercial hit. In contrast, Krauss and Sendak’s A Hole Is to Dig generated both strong reviews and brisk sales. The New York Times Book Review’s Ellen Lewis Buell thought it “a unique book” that would “set children thinking” and found Sendak’s drawings “bouncing with action and good humor.” The Horn Book praised A Hole Is to Dig as “original in approach and content” and thought its illustrations “perfect.” The San Francisco Chronicle called it “that rare and wonderful [children’s book] that is genuinely original and imaginative.”25

  The book’s success launched Maurice Sendak’s career. Krauss had insisted that rather than being paid a flat fee for his illustrations, Sendak receive half her royalties for the book. The resulting income enabled him to quit his day job and become a full-time freelance illustrator. By the end of the decade, he would illustrate seven more of Krauss’s books.26

  Krauss’s pleasure at the success of A Hole Is to Dig was tempered by Blanche Krauss Brager’s death in August 1952, on the eve of the book’s publication. Ruth and Dave spent most of a week Baltimore, attending her mother’s funeral and dealing with other matters. Less than a year and a half later, in December 1953, Dave’s mother, Mary Leisk, died.27

  Ruth returned home to more enthusiastic reviews for A Hole Is to Dig, a book that soon became a cultural phenomenon, in part because of the baby boom. Higher birth rates not only created a market for children’s books but also pushed children to the fore of public consciousness. The book’s freshness and humor as well as the misperception that it is sweet and sentimental may also have played some role in its success. More important, however, A Hole Is to Dig is in its own small way fairly radical. As Julia Mickenberg notes, Krauss is heir to the imaginative vision of the Lyrical Leftists of the 1920s— Carl Sandburg, Wanda Gág, and Alfred Kreymborg—“who wished to preserve rather than tame the child’s ‘uncivilized’ impulses.” A two-page spread depicting “Mud is to jump in and slide in and yell doodleedoodleedoo” may not be politically radical, but it does authorize the child’s right to dream and to question adult authority. To be a child is to be on the receiving end of power, to have one’s voice denied, one’s language corrected, one’s will thwarted. A Hole Is to Dig grants children agency by showing their particular voices and allowing them to define the world on their own terms. As Sendak said, Krauss was “the first to turn children’s language, concepts, and tough little pragmatic thinking into art.”28

  If contemporary readers perceived any subversive sentiments in Krauss’s work, their responses have not survived. The FBI certainly never viewed the children’s books by either Krauss or Johnson as subversive. But the FBI, HUAC, and McCarthy mostly left children’s authors alone. As Mickenberg has documented, many on the left found work in the field of children’s books because during the Cold War, “there was no blacklist per se in children’s publishing.” Seeing children’s books as a field dominated by women, Red-hunters deemed it less important and so did not watch it closely. By the middle of 1952, the FBI had backed off on its surveillance of Johnson and Krauss as well. The agency decided not to open a file on Krauss, finding “no information available that [she] has been affiliated with any subversive organizations.” On 11 June, the FBI also closed its case on Johnson, at least temporarily.29

  15

  THE ART OF COLLABORATION

  They and I are making secrets

  and we’re falling over laughing

  and we’re running in and out

  —RUTH KRAUSS, A Very Special House (1953)

  Neither Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss nor their friends and neighbors knew that the FBI had turned its attentions elsewhere. At least some Rowayton residents believed in the early 1950s that when the couple gave a party, the FBI would record the license plate numbers of those who attended. With the blacklist shrinking his American acting jobs, friend and neighbor Stefan Schnabel left to work in the West German film business until the early 1960s. Other old friends were testifying before McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. On 1 July 1953, the subcommittee called Rockwell Kent, who refused to cooperate and began to read a statement. McCarthy rushed him off the stand before he could finish, but Kent handed reporters printed copies of his prepared remarks, accusing McCarthy of “conspiracy … to overthrow our form of government … by force and violence”— precisely the charge that McCarthy was leveling at alleged communists. On the same day, another of Johnson’s New Masses colleagues, Joe Freeman, testified. Johnson must have wondered if he, too, would be called.1

  Krauss and Johnson were living among like-minded people. The section of Norwalk, Connecticut, directly east of Rowayton was Village Creek, which was and is a fully integrated community. In 1948, city planner Roger Willcox and about thirty others, most of whom were veterans who met through Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign, wanted waterfront property where they could raise their families and go sailing. They decided that “one of the basic principles” of their cooperative neighborhood should be “no discrimination.” In July 1949, they drew up a covenant prohibiting discrimination “on account of race, color, religious creed, age, sex, national origin, ancestry or physical disability.”2

  Although Dave and Ruth had friends in Village Creek and might well have bought there if it had existed when they moved to Connecticut in 1942, some Norwalk residents were suspicious. Calling it “Commie Creek,” detractors claimed that the houses’ modern roofs, when viewed from an airplane, pointed straight to New York City—clearly designed to guide Soviet bombers there. They also alleged that the big glass windows of the houses facing Long Island Sound enabled residents to signal Soviet submarines. But Village Creekers united against adversity. When local banks refused to underwrite mortgages, Village Creek property owners either built their houses themselves or sought mortgages from New York banks. When real estate agents would not show Village Creek houses to white families, Village Creekers helped keep the neighborhood integrated by selling houses via word of mouth.3

  When some of the parents in Village Creek wanted to set up a cooperative preschool, they turned to Norma Simon, whose students had inspired Krauss’s A Very Special House. In 1953, the basement of Martin and Sylvia Garment’s Village Creek house became the Community Cooperative Nursery School, providing Krauss with another venue in which to talk with children, listen to children, and transform their ideas into children’s books. Within a few years, the school moved out of the Garments’ basement and into a larger building off of Rowayton’s Witch Lane that local conservatives dubbed the “Little Red Schoolhouse.”4

  Krauss’s association with the Little Red Schoolhouse escaped the FBI’s notice, but the bureau was watching others in the neighborhood, including some of Johnson and Krauss’s friends. Mischa Richter’s wife, Helen, chased FBI agents off of her front porch with a broom. T
he agents shouted at her, “We’re gonna see you in court!” She shouted back, “I’ll be there, and I’ll be wearing my black dress!” Two blocks from Johnson and Krauss’s house, physician Abe Levine and his wife, Frume, who ran the Jewish School for the Blind’s nursery school, hid their political books behind other books on the shelf. In 1953, when one of their daughters hummed a union song, “Solidarity Forever,” in front of a friend, Frume Levine panicked even though the song shares a tune with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”5

  That year, another longtime Johnson friend, Kay Boyle, moved with her husband, Joseph Franckenstein, and their children from Europe to Rowayton after Franckenstein was suspended from his job with the U.S. Foreign Service as a security risk and Boyle found herself unable to sell her stories. Both Boyle and Franckenstein found jobs at Miss Thomas’s School.6

  Crockett Johnson, advertisement for Kimberly-Clark. Used with the consent of Neenah Paper, Inc.

  Not all of Rowayton’s residents were candidates for political persecution, however. Jack Goodman, now a director of Simon and Schuster, and his wife, Aggie, continued to spend their summers there, occasionally throwing large parties attended by such theatrical luminaries as Marlon Brando and Loretta Young, notable people from the literary world, low-ranking people from the publishing house, and neighbors—Gene Wallace and Phyllis Rowand, Abe and Frume Levine, Fred and Harriet Schwed, Harry Marinsky, Shelley Trubowitz, and Ruth and Dave. Dave was never the center of attention at parties but was more likely to observe the conversation, slightly bemused. When he did speak, his timing was excellent. In his soft voice, Dave would offer wry, well-phrased observations that made people chuckle. Often, you had to be a friend of his to appreciate his subtle humor. Filmmaker Gene Searchinger recalled a story Dave told about his sailboat. One friend had a small yacht, and the other a fairly large yacht. These two friends and Dave decided to swap boats and pay each other the difference in the values of the boats: in other words, the two people who got larger boats would pay the difference between it and the values of their original boats. At the end of the year, all three said, “Ahh, I’d rather go back to the boat I had.” So each boat went back to its original owner. At this point, Dave paused, looked at Gene very seriously, and said, “And we all made a fine profit on the deal.” Laughing as he thought about this story, Gene observed, “If you weren’t attuned, it just went right by you—you would think, ‘Well, that was kind of a silly remark.’ But it was hysterical. It was a comment about capitalism and the mythology of Americans and so on and everything else. It’s a very profound little joke.”7

  Johnson was avoiding the political spotlight and pondering his future after Barnaby. Even after the publication of Who’s Upside Down?, he had not made up his mind to pursue the children’s book business. He did advertisements for the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the American Cancer Society. He and Jules Feiffer collaborated on a comic strip, with Johnson providing the dialogue and Feiffer creating the pictures. Feiffer had just finished a two-year stint in the U.S. Army and wanted to break into children’s books. Ursula Nordstrom introduced him to Maurice Sendak, who in turn introduced him to Krauss and Johnson. Feiffer was thrilled when Johnson suggested that they collaborate on a new comic: “I thought this was my chance to get into the big time, which I had up till then taken several shots at and was in despair that nothing was happening.” They created two weeks of strips about a private eye named Herkimer and his assistant, Matson, a small boy. Feiffer and Johnson never settled on a name for the comic, and no syndicate was interested.8

  Crockett Johnson and Jules Feiffer, untitled comic strip, 1953. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.

  Maurice Sendak, two-page spread from Ruth Krauss, A Very Special House (New York: Harper, 1953). Pictures copyright © 1953 by Maurice Sendak. Copyright © renewed 1981 by Maurice Sendak. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.

  Reviewers and readers, however, were very interested in Krauss and Sendak’s second collaboration, A Very Special House, published in November 1953. The book offers an even stronger endorsement of children’s ideas than did its predecessor and is more radical in the freedoms it grants children. Its protagonist draws on walls, jumps on the bed, and brings home a lion (who eats the stuffing from the cushions) and a monkey (who leaves “little feetprints on the ceiling”), but “NOBODY ever says stop stop stop stop.” The book completely disregards adult authority, encouraging children to think and act independently. Reviewers embraced the idea. The Horn Book’s Virginia Haviland thought A Very Special House “as full of bounce as A Hole is to Dig and even richer in ideas fascinating to small children.” Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Margaret Ford Kieran praised the book’s “unorthodox” qualities, suggesting that it would “win the approval of fond uncles and aunts more than parents.” While it is “no handbook for deportment,” “in the blowing-off-steam department, it deserves an award.” It won a Caldecott Honor in March 1954.9

  Crockett Johnson, illustration from the dummy of Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson, Is This You? Image courtesy of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.

  Krauss and Sendak had already begun work on their next project, I’ll Be You and You Be Me. As with A Very Special House, the author and illustrator were very much in sync, and Sendak found the process “great fun because every page was an experiment, every page we changed our minds. And yet the book hangs together in a way that’s fascinating because it’s the two of us.” In the wake of the strong reviews and sales for their first two books and with their third collaboration under contract, Krauss thought that she and Sendak deserved more than their customary five-hundred-dollar advance for their next project, I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue, a color chosen because it was Krauss’s favorite. He agreed but was apprehensive about raising the issue because “anything relating to money with Ursula was a nightmare.” In the early spring of 1954, he and Krauss were in Nordstrom’s office and Krauss brought up the subject of how much she and Sendak were being paid: Given their success, they should get a larger advance. Her voice rising, Nordstrom suddenly “became the House of Harper” and accused Krauss and Sendak of being ungrateful. Nordstrom had given Krauss the freedom to create A Hole Is to Dig and to choose Sendak as her artist—an artist, she reminded Krauss, who had no experience. “Who else in the whole world would do that?,” Nordstrom asked. Krauss replied, “OK. It happened already. We’ve done it, and we’re a successful team.” The tension between the two women made Sendak uneasy. He shrank deeper into his chair, no longer caring whether they received more money. He just wanted the fight to be over. But Nordstrom was angry. She cleared her desk with her hands, sending papers, books, and pencils flying, with some landing on Krauss and Sendak. They hastily pushed back their chairs. Nordstrom began screaming, “Get out! Get out!” Krauss and Sendak fled to the elevator and began their descent from the sixth floor to the lobby. He was thinking, “This is the end. I’m through at age twenty-six! Why has Ruth blown it all for money?” Krauss tried to console him. When they reached the lobby, the elevator doors opened to reveal Nordstrom, who. She had run down six flights of stairs to continue her tirade. “I never want to see you again! Get the hell out of my sight!,” she shouted. Sendak thought his career was finished. Instead, a few weeks later, he and Krauss each received a one-thousand-dollar advance for I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue.10

  Crockett Johnson, “Is This How You Take a Bath?,” from Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson, Is This You? (New York: Scott, 1955). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.

  Krauss was
working on other books in addition to those with Sendak, including two that Johnson illustrated, How to Make an Earthquake (1954) and Is This You? (1955). He also provided drawings for Margaret Wise Brown’s Willie’s Adventures, published in 1954, after her death. Is This You?, credited to Johnson and Krauss as coauthors, provides a sense of how they worked together. The book, which was her idea, teaches children how to write a book. Krauss was inspired by her childhood and by her friendship with seven-year-old Nina Rowand Wallace, who then lived right across the street. Wallace recalled, “Sometimes Ruth would take me off on adventures, … and she’d say, ‘Let’s get lost. It’s so much fun to get lost.’” The pair would go “driving around the back roads of Darien and Westport and Norwalk,” and the girl learned the “wonderful thing … that it’s okay to be lost, and that it’s always an adventure and you never know where things will turn.” Krauss used the same method when creating a book.11

  Is This You? poses a simple question, offers preposterous answers, and then asks the question again. For the question “Is this how you take a bath?,” Krauss suggested a series of accompanying illustrations: a child in a “bird-bath—with birds & big brush,” a child with “bathing-cap and towel” placing a “finger in [a] soup-bowl,” a child in a “tank with [a] big rhino,” and a child “asleep in bed.” The series ends with the reader prompted to draw a picture of how he or she takes a bath. Johnson suggested replacing the illustration of the sleeping child “because of bedwetters and their shame. How about in shower with umbrella, raincoat & rubber boots?” Krauss agreed with Johnson’s concerns, writing “Yes” next to his suggestion. She crossed out “asleep in own bed” as well as his suggestion of “in shower with umbrella, raincoat & rubber boots” and added some of her own ideas: “day-dreaming,” “grapefruit in the eye,” “elephant-trunk,” and “in very-very elaborate set-up” with “butlers, towels galore,” and “bubbles.” Next to “elephant-trunk,” Dave wrote, “No—too trite.” In the final book, Dave illustrated the bird bath and the soup bowl; the child bathing with a large animal, although a hippo has replaced the rhino; and a child in a shower with a raincoat, hat, and boots. The drafts show a couple talking to one another and taking one another seriously. 12