Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss

by Philip Nel

  Johnson then returned to Magic Beach. After rewriting and shortening it, he decided it was “much better than the old one” and sent the manuscript back to Nordstrom in May. Harper reader Ann Jorgensen Tobias thought the story too “depressing” and complex for children, and Nordstrom admitted, “As an adult I love the mood of the story, and the tone of sadness. But we’re afraid that it just isn’t a children’s book.”20

  That May brought similar criticism of Krauss’s latest book, Mama, I Wish I Was Snow—Child, You’d Be Very Cold, published not by Harper but by Atheneum. Instead of gathering ideas from children or inventing a story, Krauss adapted Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Cancion Tonta” (Silly Song), and Ellen Raskin provided illustrations. Kirkus called the book a “disappointment from the usually dependable Ruth Krauss,” and the New York Times Book Review’s George A. Woods predicted that the book would “leave children very cold indeed.” The Christian Science Monitor thought it unlikely even “to strike responsive chords in even the more imaginative child…. Sorry. Will await more butterflies.”21

  Though Krauss was finding places to publish her poetry for adults, her verse yielded very little money. A couple of months before, New World Writing finally “‘bought’ some poetry” she had sent eight months earlier—for fourteen dollars. Still, she overlooked the reply’s tardiness and cashed the check. Hoping for a better return on her children’s books, Krauss sent a draft of her latest manuscript to literary agent Marilyn Marlow. Reminiscent of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon (1947), the Goodnight Book followed a child saying goodnight to various items—eyes, nose, fingers, toes, windows, doors, even Bloomingdales. Wary of working through an agent, Nordstrom was glad when Krauss decided not to have Marlow represent this book, but the author-editor relationship was changing.22

  In addition to finding a better title for the Goodnight Book, Krauss needed to find an illustrator. She admired Beni Montresor’s work but did not know him. Erik Blegvad lived nearby, but she was not sure he would be a good fit. Visiting old friends Nina and Herman Schneider in their Greenwich Village apartment, Krauss saw some artwork by their daughter, Elizabeth Susan Schneider, and asked if she would be interested in illustrating the book. Schneider welcomed the chance to prove herself to a publisher and won the job.23

  At age nineteen, Schneider took the train up from New York up to Rowayton on her first professional assignment as an illustrator. Krauss picked her up at the station wearing “this little muumuu-ish kind of dress, which she always wore.” It was a very hot day, and Krauss began fluffing herself, saying, “I can’t stand having anything binding me. I just can’t stand clothing that sticks close to my body.” At 74 Rowayton Avenue, Schneider presented her ideas for the very spare text, Krauss liked what she saw, and they had no further inperson discussions about the book. This would not be another close working relationship, as Krauss had had with Sendak. These days, she was a poet first.24

  She again went to the Wagner conference in July. That year, Willard Maas directed the conference, and the writers in residence included Kay Boyle and Kenneth Koch. Ruth’s poem “Duet” appeared in XbyX, “a one shot magazine put out by” Maas. Gerald Malanga published another Ruth Krauss poem in the Wagner Literary Magazine, which Allen Ginsberg called “the best college magazine in America.”25

  Johnson returned to his most successful character, putting together Harold’s ABC. He had fun working in King Uranus, “the pre-Olympian god of the universe,” and Queen Urania, “the somewhat later muse of astronomy,” doubting whether “many seven-year-old classic scholars will write in complaining about the royal marriage as a barbarism.” Johnson was confident that Nordstrom and her editors would like his “nonsensical tour de force,” and they did. Ann Jorgensen Tobias and Carr made a few suggestions: When Harold reached the letter V, he lost interest in finishing the alphabet but only wanted to go home. Carr wrote, “It bothers me that Harold gives up. He never has before, and I don’t think he should…. The thing about Harold is that he is so invincible. I really think Dave should not let him get so depressed.” They also found had questions about “Z is for Zigzag. Dragging his crayon behind him, Harold sleepily staggered off to bed.” This seemed “anticlimactic.” He received a contract and a two-thousand-dollar advance for the book in January 1963, reworked the end of the book, and finished the manuscript in February.26

  In Harold’s ABC, the seventh and last book to feature Harold, each letter forms a part of the object it names: A is the house’s attic, B a stack of two books, C a cake with one slice (called a “cut”) removed for Harold to eat. Most letters name more than one item: E stands for an “enormous edifice” made out of the letter as well as for “Etcetera” and for the elevators that Harold avoids because “they made his stomach feel funny.” Not the more common arbitrary collection of alphabet words, Harold’s ABC forms a narrative of the boy’s journey through the alphabet, with each letter leading to the next. As is true of the other Harold books, Harold’s ABC looks simple but is not.

  During the fall of 1962, Krauss met regularly with Jane Flora, who was illustrating A Bouquet of Littles, a verse ode to smallness that strives for but does not quite arrive at the pithiness of A Hole Is to Dig and Open House for Butterflies, featuring such lines as “A little rug best fits a little floor, / A little storeman best fits a little store, / As my small sea best fits my little roar” and “a little storm best fits a little thunder / a little Alice best fits a little wonder.” Krauss was finding it “a ‘lulu’ to get a good picture-motif” going. A bit frustrated with the creative process, she joked to Nordstrom, “At this point, I’ve decided no more pic-books and no more poetry. Bibles, that’s what I’ll write.”27

  Krauss was now studying poetry with O’Hara, whom she affectionately called “my teach,” which amused him because he was not then as accomplished as she was. A fall 1962 mimeographed collection, New School Poets, contains three Krauss poems: “My Dream with Its Solar-Pulse Gallop,” “Andy Auto Body,” and “Imitation,” a single-line riff on T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1922): “In the womb the womb men come and go.”28

  At midnight on 23 November 1962, two hundred people filled New York’s Living Theatre for a “Reading of Poetry of Wagner Poets.” Maas moderated, and the fourteen featured poets included Jean Boudin, Malanga, David Shapiro, Frank Lima, and Krauss. Though she disliked giving public readings, she did so on this occasion because it was a benefit for the Wagner Literary Magazine, which had published her, and because she wanted to support the school where her friend Maas taught.29

  When not receiving guests or accompanying Krauss to midnight poetry readings, Johnson returned to revising the new Ellen stories. He conceded that the charge of “a general tone of crabbiness” was “a well-taken criticism” and made changes, including a complete rewriting of one of the tales. He now thought that the stories were “really pretty good, good enough to publish somewhere,” though he acknowledged, “my opinion of the seemliness of my works can be a bit off; it still seems to me that far and away the best small thing I have done is that Magic Beach opus you sent rapidly back and which, since, half a dozen editors enthusiastically have turned down.” He asked Nordstrom to tell him whether these revised tales would make “a Harper Ellen’s Lion sequel” or to “give [him] a definite rejection.”30

  In December 1962, Elizabeth Schneider brought her dummy for Krauss’s latest book, now called Eyes Nose Fingers Toes, to Nordstrom and Dorothy Hagen, the director of operations for Harper’s manufacturing department. The text for Eyes Nose Fingers Toes does not specify the protagonist’s gender, and Schneider had drawn a little girl. Hagen suggested changing the child to a boy because girl characters did not sell as well as boy characters. Krauss’s response was uncharacteristically practical: “People buy boy’s books for girls but not visa versa…. I hate so much work to go into a book, & then to have it not sell because it’s a girl.” In any case, she added, “I feel I’ve done my share & still do it of campaigning against
male chauvinism.” Krauss’s willingness to see her book as simply a marketable product signals a changed relationship to children’s literature: It was where she made her living, but not where she was most emotionally invested. Schneider would have to redo the drawings.31

  In May 1962, Harper and Brothers merged with a textbook publisher, Row, Peterson, and Company, and major changes soon followed. Nordstrom was optimistic that the merger would give her books an entry into the elementary school and high school markets, writing to Johnson, “We think their seventy (70) salesmen will be great helps in selling Harold to schools. We think all our children’s books will benefit, but Harold (especially the drawing one) is an example of a trade children’s book which can be used in schools by an imaginative teacher.” She joked,

  I refer to the 70 salesmen as though I were an old Coney Island type producer—you know:

  30 GIRLS 30!

  But I say: 70 SALESMEN 70! Step up for the next show, price two bits.

  Excuse me.

  Though she took the changes with a sense of humor, as Leonard Marcus notes, the merger “prepared the ground for a historic change in the company’s management culture,” strengthening the publisher’s business side. After 1967, when the chairmanship of Harper’s executive committee passed from Harper’s Cass Canfield Sr. to Row, Peterson’s Gordon Jones, “the house was now in the hands of business-oriented people, while those who combined business with editorial creativity were out of control.”32

  The new business emphasis would push Krauss and Johnson away from Harper, and both began to publish more frequently with other presses. In middle age, they were not content to repeat themselves. Though they could have relied on proven formulae for success, they instead kept inventing, Krauss in verse and Johnson in his increasingly philosophical tales. As Krauss had done, Johnson also wanted to pursue interests beyond the field of children’s books. His first successful career was as a cartoonist. His second, a picture book author. Maybe it was time to bring this second career to a close and to do something else. But what?

  22

  PROVOCATEUR AND PHILOSOPHER

  What a fine day for

  an act and a show

  a cold and a snow

  —RUTH KRAUSS, What a Fine Day For … (1967)

  Now back in touch with Ad Reinhardt, Crockett Johnson was taking an interest in his old friend’s career. In April 1963, noting that Reinhardt’s paintings were on display “around the world,” Johnson asked, “Have you thought of Rowayton?” Kidding Reinhardt, who was then being canonized as a major American painter, Johnson added, “We have a nice little Art Association here and I think if I played my cards right I could wangle you into a group show. Oils priced over thirty dollars don’t sell very well of course, and it will cost you fifteen dollars to join, but the prestige is enormous.” Reinhardt should come up to take a look: “Pack a pile of your representative (I mean representative of your work; don’t go and paint a lot of representational pictures through any misunderstanding) canvases and your family in the car and take off.”1

  If Reinhardt could not make it up to Rowayton, Johnson said he would visit on 1 May, when he and Ruth would be in Brooklyn Heights for a party hosted by Willard Maas and Marie Menken. Their parties were a who’s who of the culturally influential. Andy Warhol called Maas and Menken “the last of the great Bohemians. They wrote and filmed and drank (their friends called them ‘scholarly drunks’) and were involved with all the modern poets.”2

  In 1963, Ruth Krauss published one of her most important poems, “This Breast,” in the Wagner Literary Magazine. Begun in Kenneth Koch’s class the previous year, the poem’s inspiration may be Koch’s “Thank You” (1962), which gives thanks for a series of items unlikely to generate feelings of gratitude: “Thank you for the chance to run a small hotel / In an elephant stopover in Zambezi, / But I do not know how to take care of guests, certainly they would all leave soon.” Generating her own absurdist repetitions, Krauss’s recurring “This breast” takes the place of Koch’s recurring “Thank you.” Krauss’s sense of epic repetition likely also derived from her readings of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg.3

  The most striking difference between Krauss’s poem and Koch’s is tone. Where Koch sustains irony throughout, Krauss goes directly for surrealist pastiche. One stanza begins,

  This breast as the Irish Statesman so shrewdly remarked most unabashed explorer of the crypts of the soul

  This breast—but we have nothing but the word of Mr. Snooks

  This breast a dove

  This breast the flower of Gum Swamp

  This breast a little confused by this possibility

  Juxtaposing this breast with a wide array of unrelated items creates a series of associations, ranging from comic to serious, banal to baffling. Koch’s poem renders thank you ironic, but Krauss’s poem completely changes the meaning of this breast. Alignment with such disparate phrases as Mexican poetry and Chinese history and I seen it in the papers empties out the word’s meaning, transforming breast into a universal signifier. It can be an Irish Statesman, “composed entirely of scraps of historic fact,” or a “Dostoevskian masterpiece.”

  Krauss’s collection of avant-garde poems for children, which did not include “This Breast,” was now making the rounds, represented by Marilyn Marlow. Like Ursula Nordstrom at Harper, Atheneum editor Jean Karl wondered about audience. Though the work “could only be done as a picture book,” it seemed not “really suitable for the picture book age.” Atheneum had published Krauss’s Lorca book the previous year, and it had received poor reviews, adding to Karl’s skepticism. Nevertheless, Karl “would certainly be glad to read anything” Krauss sent. This was best-selling children’s writer Ruth Krauss, author of A Hole Is to Dig and A Very Special House. Perhaps she would yet produce another hit?4

  Writing would become his most famous book, Maurice Sendak got stuck and came to visit Krauss and Johnson. After his Nutshell Library (1962) sold one hundred thousand copies in its first year, Nordstrom, seeing the makings of a successful series, asked him to create more Nutshell books. Having illustrated fifty books in the preceding decade, Sendak did not want to repeat himself. He wanted to do something new. When she suggested that someone else create sequels instead, he was upset. The Nutshell Library was his idea. Nordstrom backed off, and Sendak returned to Where the Wild Horses Are, a book he had begun in 1955, during his apprenticeship with Krauss and Johnson but had set aside in favor of other projects. In the first months of 1963, Sendak carried around a spiral notebook, rewriting the story every few days. By May, Sendak had finished drafting the text and had changed the book’s title to Where the Wild Things Are. But he remained unsatisfied and began making trips to Rowayton in search of guidance. As Sendak struggled with what to call the series of three wordless two-page spreads where the main character, Max, and the Wild Things cavort in the forest, Johnson proposed the word rumpus. So right before this visual sequence, Max says, “Let the wild rumpus start!” Sendak later reflected, “Max was born in Rowayton and … was the love child of me, Ruth, and Dave.” Krauss and Johnson had taught Sendak the need to have a “fierce honesty” in children’s books. Though Max is a version of Sendak, he also “has his roots in Ruth Krauss”—specifically, in her belief that children “were allowed to be as cruel and maniacal as she knew they were.”5

  The love child of the New York School and the Bank Street School, the first of Krauss’s poem plays made it to the stage on 10 June 1963 as part of The Pocket Follies at New York’s Pocket Theater. In its entirety, A Beautiful Day has a girl walk on stage, announce, “What a beautiful day!” and then “the Sun falls down onto the stage.” Remy Charlip staged four very different versions, which were interspersed throughout the production as a running gag.6

  The play was warmly received, but Krauss probably did not see it. During the first week of June 1963, Phyllis Rowand began having severe headaches. Ruth drove her to the hospital, where doctors discovered a brain aneurysm. Ten days later,
she was dead at the age of forty-seven. The loss of such a close friend caused Dave to face his own mortality but not the health risks of his smoking. Though it was three years before the surgeon general’s warning would appear on cigarette packets, the opening scene in “Doctor’s Orders,” from Ellen’s Lion, suggests that Dave knew the hazards. Pretending to be a doctor, Ellen says, “You’re a mighty sick little lion…. You’ll have to stop smoking.” Dave did not stop smoking, but he did draw up a will. (Ruth postponed facing anything that reminded her of her mortality.) His will offers a clear sense of who was most important to him. He left Ruth everything. If she were to predecease him, half of his estate would go to his sister’s children; a quarter would go to Linda and Nancy Hahn, the children of Ruth’s cousin, Richard Hahn; one-eighth would go to close friends Abe and Frume Levine; and one-eighth would go to Nina Rowand Wallace, who began art school that fall.7 In her absence, Dave and Ruth became closer to the Frasconis. Antonio, Leona, and their sons Pablo (age eleven) and Miguel (age six) began a tradition of having Spaghetti Night at 74 Rowayton Avenue each Wednesday. After dinner, the adults sat at the kitchen table, drinking wine, and talking about art. Observing the creative lives of their parents and their parents’ friends, the boys started to create art of their own. Pablo wrote poetry in Ruth’s style, “experimenting with absurd and surreal imagery.” He showed his poems to Ruth, and she encouraged him to keep at it.8

  Maurice Sendak at Lake Mohonk, New York, October 1968. At photographer Nancy Crampton’s suggestion, Maurice posed on this waterbike, which is right alongside the dock and firmly tethered to it. Copyright © Nancy Crampton.