by Philip Nel
In contrast, Krauss’s method of composition focused much more on the process than on the final result. Where Johnson would write out a complete story and then modify it according to the suggestions of his editors, Krauss made many drafts. Where Johnson would send either a complete book or a selection of complete stories, Krauss often sketched out her ideas in a letter, using Nordstrom’s interest (or lack of it) to determine whether to proceed. On one occasion, Krauss asked Nordstrom if she would be interested in “a sort of bastard form between a record & a book.” The song would be something that children recognized, but adults might be unable to “finish its middle” or “to begin it right” and indeed might “get it all mixed up, instead of just not being able to remember it.” However, she wondered, “Does the child want the song to be mixed up, revolutionary, or want to have it straight?” The implication of her idea, she said, would “be that kids know things adults have long forgotten.” In another instance, Krauss envisioned a conversation between a little boy and his mother in which he announces what he would like to be, and she responds: When he wants to be a “wee mousie” so he can “run over the table,” she would be a “mother-mousie.” Krauss held onto all of her ideas, whether or not Nordstrom liked them, and sometimes reworked them.14
Krauss also continued to dream of writing for adults, joining a writing group that included Kay Boyle, Doris Lund, Bet Hennefrund, Pat Brooks, Cay Skelly, and sometimes others. Boyle and Krauss were the most accomplished of the group, followed by Skelly, the author, under her maiden name, Cathleen Schurr, of a popular Little Golden Book, The Shy Little Kitten (1946). Such a group would help Krauss in three ways. First, it would compel her to write rather than wait for inspiration, as was her inclination. Second, uncertain of her own abilities, she relied on others’ judgment in determining what worked and what did not. Third, apart from a few early pulp magazine stories, she had never succeeded at writing for adults.15
Krauss’s work for children began receiving critical praise from unlikely quarters. In 1958, W. D. Snodgrass, whose Heart’s Needle would win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1960, compared the record version of The Carrot Seed (which Krauss apparently adapted) to Thomas Grey’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” as well as to the writings of Philip Larkin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Frost. All, Snodgrass said, exemplify the poet’s tact, able to shape meaning “by crucial words or phrases which are never spoken.” In this essay, Krauss’s children’s story appears not just as an interesting anecdote but as an expression of a core belief about aesthetic quality.16
Although reviewers and readers liked Krauss’s new books, the sales figures did not approach those generated by the phenomenal A Hole Is to Dig. The Harold series remained a strong seller for Harper, and with Johnson producing a new volume each year, the potential income was substantial. Nordstrom made sure to let both authors know that Harper was doing its best to keep their works on the bookstore shelves. In December 1957, the F. A. O. Schwarz toy catalog featured Terrible Terrifying Toby, which could lead to big sales and was, Nordstrom explained, quite “an honor.” Both Johnson and Krauss were also “well represented” in Harper’s catalog, and the publisher was running ads for their books in the New Yorker and the New York Times. Nevertheless, fissures would soon develop in the author-editor relationship.17
19
“HITTING ON ALL 24 CYLINDERS”
So, before he went to bed, he drew another picture.
—CROCKETT JOHNSON, A Picture for Harold’s Room (1960)
Creatively, 1958 began very well for Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson. She was working on a book based on the artwork she had collected from children at the Rowayton public schools over the past six years. One child had drawn “Girl with the Sun on a String,” a bright round yellow circle with yellow lines radiating outward; one line ran all the way down into the grip of a little girl’s hand. A drawing of a white circle against a darker background bore the caption “A Moon or a Button.” Instead of A Book of First Definitions (the subtitle of A Hole Is to Dig), this would be A Book of First Picture Ideas.
As with A Hole Is to Dig, Krauss repeatedly arranged and rearranged her ideas. Over three pages of notes titled “Child’s Eye Visual,” she created a layout of the illustration as a narrative, with each scene loosely suggesting the next. Krauss’s associative logic creates a story that unfolds like a dream.1
Though recovering from a sprained ankle in early 1958, Johnson wrote three new stories and rewrote another. As Ursula Nordstrom told him, “You certainly are hitting on all 24 cylinders these days.” Joining the roster of classic Crockett Johnson characters were Ellen, an imaginative preschooler, and a stuffed lion, her best friend and confidant. The lion is skeptical, unsentimental; Ellen is relentlessly creative, inventing adventures for herself and her lion, often a reluctant participant. Similar to Bill Watterson’s Hobbes nearly thirty years later, the lion’s status as stuffed animal is never in question, but his ability to think independently varies. He appears to be both animated by Ellen’s imagination and able to arrive at his own conclusions, which tend to contradict hers. When she thinks he is sad and tries to sympathize with him, he tells her, “All this talk of sympathy for my feelings is silly, Ellen. I’m a stuffed animal.”2
What Harold achieves with his purple crayon, Ellen does with words and props—she imagines for herself a role as malleable as the universe she creates. Like Barnaby’s friend, Jane, Ellen does not limit herself to “girlish” activities but moves easily between feminine and masculine roles. When the story “Fairy Tale” begins, Ellen is the “fairy godmother”; a few paragraphs later, she has become “the invincible knight”; near the end, she turns into “the lovely princess”; and she ends up as Ellen. Johnson also playfully shifts the narrative voice back and forth between Ellen’s perspective and the view of a slightly bemused observer—sometimes in the same sentence. “Fairy Tale” begins, “Once, twice, and thrice the beautiful fairy waved her wand and, before she spoke, she took another bite of muffin covered with raspberry jam.” Later, “the knight” is “eating jam and muffin as she surveyed the besieging army across the wide moat.” Though the shifts from Ellen to the mildly ironic narrator do invite a smile at her games, Ellen’s Lion treats her wishes with sympathy. Unlike Russell Hoban’s Bedtime for Frances (1960), in which Father uses the threat of “a spanking” to silence Frances’s imagination, Ellen’s Lion celebrates a little girl’s inventive mind.
Ruth Krauss, “Child’s Eye Visual,” early layout for A Moon or a Button (New York: Harper, 1959). 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.
In February, Johnson sent the first four Ellen stories to Nordstrom “in the hope that you will have time in the next week or two to look at it and let me know if it seems to you to be anything for children (or anything for anybody).” If she liked these stories, he would write more. Both Nordstrom and Susan Carr loved them: Carr thought “these Ellen and lion stories are absolutely enchanting, and will make a marvelous book. I am most eager to see the rest of the ms, and have no criticism at this point.” During March, he wrote another seven stories.3
Johnson was also rewriting The Frowning Prince, redoing the color separations for The Blue Ribbon Puppies, and sketching plans for Harold’s Circus, the fifth purple crayon adventure. On 7 April, he wrote, “I haven’t had anything to do for a month except make up things in my head,” suggesting that creating stories came easily to him. He had spent that time “sketch[ing] out a another ‘Harold’ book that I think will work out pretty well. It can be called ‘Harold’s Circus’ maybe.” In a sentence, he then describes the entire plot of what would become Harold’s Circus. Would Harper “want another ‘Harold’ book for 1959?” Dave asked. Nordstrom replied that Harold’s Circus could “be one of the best” and suggested making it a spring 1959 book: “I
f we do The Frowning Prince in the same publishing season it can’t make too much of a problem I am sure because they are both so different.”4
The Frowning Prince is different. Readers accustomed to smiling (or at least benign) expressions on the faces of Crockett Johnson’s characters may be surprised by the prince’s determined frown. When a king begins reading a storyard, bowing low again. “For one, your father has just said so, and he is the king.”
“Tell us one of the other reasons,” said the prince.
The grand wizard took off his glasses and polished them carefully. When he spoke again it was to the king.
“Tell me, your majesty, just how did all this arise?”
“Yesterday I borrowed a book from you,” said the king. “A fairy tale.”
“Yes, I remember it was the last book-of-the-moon selection. One arrives every perigee,” said the grand about a princess with “an irresistible smile,” his son proclaims, “Nobody could make me smile.” Determined to prove his son wrong, the king calls in jesters, jugglers, and even the grand wizard. The queen, however, understands that this battle of wills merely encourages the prince: She tells the king, “Try not to let it bother you” and tells the prince, “It will go away,” patting his head. Johnson’s story playfully pokes fun at its fairy tale status: When the wizard suggests summoning the smiling princess from the book, the king tells him not to bother because the “book said the princess lived once upon a time.” The wizard reminds him, “This is once upon a time.” When the king points out that “the princess also lived in a faraway land,” the wizard reasons, “This kingdom of yours is a faraway land, your majesty. And if two lands are both far away, they must be close to each other.” Subtly advancing a theme of peace, the king must “call off the wars” with the neighboring kingdom to invite the other king and queen and their daughter for a weekend visit. Sure enough, the prince does at last smile, though the tale never indicates whether the cause is the princess’s smile or the court’s concession that the prince’s frown is “immovable.” The royal couples find that they have “much in common and enjoyed each other’s company immensely,” and, with the two kingdoms at peace, the “happy subjects” go back and forth between countries as well.
Crockett Johnson, page from The Frowning Prince (New York: Harper, 1959). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Harper bought those books, but Johnson also wrote one that either he never submitted to Nordstrom or Harper turned down. Will Spring Be Early? Or Will Spring Be Late? won a contract from Thomas Y. Crowell, publishers of the Crockett Johnson–illustrated Mickey’s Magnet. On 2 February, the conscientious Groundhog prepares to make his prediction and must verify that spring will be early. As he listens and smells for the sun, a passing Artificial Flower Co. truck interferes with his senses. When he finds an artificial flower that has fallen from the truck, he thinks it real and shouts, “Spring! It’s here now!” He rushes off to tell the Badger, Dormouse, Rabbit, Skunk, Chipmunk, Squirrel, Raccoon, Bear, and Pig. Echoing Krauss’s The Happy Day, the animals dance in a circle around the flower. The Pig does not join in but instead chomps the flower and then announces, “The leaves are paper. The stem is wire. The petals are plastic. And the lot of you will freeze out here.” He makes his own prediction: “It’s going to snow.” In a reversal of The Happy Day, this flower growing in the snow is not a sign of spring. The snowstorm begins, the “Groundhog [begins] to creep quietly away,” and the disappointed animals seek to assign fault:
“We were all so happy,” the Dormouse said, “until the Pig came and chewed the flower.”
“Precisely!” shouted the Bear. “And now we’re cold and miserable and ridiculous! It’s perfectly clear who’s to blame!”
The book ends with the narrator’s summation: “They blamed the Pig, of course.” The Groundhog continues to make his predictions each February, and Johnson’s comic twist evokes a laugh of recognition at the human tendency to blame the messenger.
While continuing to write, Johnson and Krauss also oversaw foreign editions of their earlier books and promoted their work at home. When Constable and Company printed Harold and the Purple Crayon in the United Kingdom, the publisher made some changes in color, which in turn changed the line of the drawing. Now that Constable was planning to publish A Hole Is to Dig, Krauss was wary. Maurice would check on the colors himself when in England in late August 1958. If the publisher felt that he and Krauss were “being overly precious about this book,” she wrote, “well, we are. We love the book. We both feel that its physical appearance—which was experimental in form … —is important to its appeal as a book.” She, Sendak, Nordstrom, Johnson, and Harper’s production department had “worked hard on the physical make up of the book,” and they wanted “the English edition to be a lasting one—if it ever comes about.” Either Krauss and Sendak’s demands deterred Constable, or the publisher was not able to meet them. A Hole Is to Dig was not published in the United Kingdom until Hamish Hamilton’s 1963 edition.5
In the United States, Krauss and Johnson made appearances to promote their work. They celebrated National Library Week at the Rowayton Library on 18 March 1958, joining other local writers such as New Yorker cartoonist Carl Rose, magazine writer John Sharnick, and journalist Leonard Gross, whose God and Freud had just been published. Many of the authors on hand were Johnson-Krauss friends: Fred Schwed, Phyllis Rowand, Aggie Goodman, and Jim Flora, who had moved to Rowayton in 1952 with his wife, Jane, and their children. When rock-and-roll records’ preference for photographic jackets pushed his bright, angular jacket art out of favor, Flora began creating colorfully offbeat children’s books, among them The Fabulous Fireworks Family (1955) and The Day the Cow Sneezed (1957). He and Johnson shared a background in typography and magazine design plus interests in playing with language, boats, and humor.6
Johnson’s subversive wit emerged in his response to critics who complained that Harold’s decoration of blank white pages inspired young readers to draw in books. A librarian from Ontario’s Niagara Falls Public Library wrote of “the havoc” Johnson had caused, submitting as evidence the final two pages from Harold’s Fairy Tale, generously embellished by a young reader’s crayon. She added, “We have been accused of becoming a passive audience, it must give you pleasure to have written books which inspire action.” Johnson was indeed pleased to inspire creativity, but he had heard this particular complaint one too many times and drafted a long, satirical reply. Although he was very aware of “the scourge of crayon vandalism,” she had “been taken in by the enemy”:
Your letter reveals that you have no grasp of the problem that faces us and that you know very little about our opponents. Their organization, on the surface, is so apparently loose-knit and casual that I daresay you have not recognized it as an organization at all. Its members are disarmingly young, which tends to lead a superficial observer to laugh at the assertion that it systematically has been destroying the world’s literature for centuries…. The average crayon vandal seems childlike and innocent, and actually he is. But there are millions like him, each with his small urge for destruction developed and channeled by the efficient hard core of the organization, by its precocious and dedicated leaders.
In fact, the Harold books were part of Johnson’s plan to stop crayon vandalism: “A ‘Harold’ book invites an average vandal to indulge himself vicariously, to sublimate his urge. Often the effect is so long-lasting that the next two or three books that fall into his hands are spared. When any such lapse occurs the organization [decides that it] can no longer depend on member and he, finding himself with few assignments, usually begins to lose interest, and often he drops out. The object of course is to decimate the enemy’s ranks, ultimately to make the dread organization of crayon vandals a thing of the past.” He concluded, “But it is much too soon to talk of total victory…. It will be a matter of years, probably, before world statistics on crayon marks per page, for the first t
ime in history, show a noticeable downward trend. But the day will come!” Having vented his feelings, Johnson sent the letter to Nordstrom but not to the complaining librarian.7
The intensity of Johnson’s response is noteworthy because he tended to be modest about his work. He frequently worried, for example, that his characters all looked the same, and his concerns were not unfounded: The boy from The Carrot Seed could be a brother of Barnaby or Harold. However, what Johnson saw as an aesthetic weakness is actually a strength. His clean, precise style depicts only the details the story requires, omitting all else. In the words of R. O. Blechman, “Simplicity shows respect for the viewer. You don’t give more than what the mind needs, nor less than what the eye deserves.” Johnson’s effective, efficient mode of storytelling looks simple but is in fact the result of rigorous perfectionism. As Johnson once said, “Never overlook the art of the seemingly simple.”8
