by Philip Nel
Johnson’s mathematical correspondents had expanded to include Vince Crockett Harris, a math professor at San Diego State College, and Howard Levi, a math professor at the City College of New York. They helped Johnson express his proofs, correcting his formulae or working out their own proofs. Levi came to visit Johnson in Rowayton several times and thought that his “geometrical discoveries” were “all unconventional, and in many cases seem to have considerable substance.”7
In the summer of 1972, Dave and Ruth left Rowayton behind, buying a house at 24 Owenoke Park in Westport, seven miles up the coast. Though it also overlooked Long Island Sound, the new house had space for an aboveground studio, where Dave could paint undisturbed by noise or water. After twenty-seven years, they were, in Ruth’s words, “upheaving from the Old Rowayton Poetry Sweatshop & Geometry Grounds to the New Owenoke Peninsula Poetry, Geometry and Coffee Grounds—in among the swamp birds, politely called ‘marsh birds.’” By August, Dave and Ruth had moved into their new home.8
They unpacked boxes, trying to locate books and manuscripts and recovering from their moving injuries. As Ruth said, “I’ve strained my something or other and Dave strained his something also.” Strained or not, she was working on illustrations and, with the help of her friend Valerie Harms, selecting poems for This Breast Gothic, a collection to be published the following year by the Bookstore Press, a small outfit based in Lenox, Massachusetts, and run by poet Gerald Hausman; his wife, Lorry; and David Silverstein, all of whom Krauss had befriended during her summer in Stockbridge.9
Thinking that their conversation would make an interesting interview, Harms brought a tape recorder. Krauss explained that she wanted poems that have “the same feeling” as “This Breast” and discussed the order in which the selections should appear. Krauss also offered interpretations of some of her work, such as “Silence,” a poem consisting of fourteen lines of four underscored blank spaces. Citing John Cage’s Silence as an inspiration, Krauss described her poem as a “sonnet” that “you can fill … in yourself”: “You can read anything into it you want.” Given the themes of some poems in the collection, Krauss suggested that the blank four-letter words might be “sex in situations. I mean, f-u-c-k, f-u-c-k, f-u-c-k. Or it can mean l-o-v-e, l-o-v-e, l-o-v-e. Or it can mean s-h-i-t, s-h-i-t, whatever.”10
Krauss had mostly stopped writing poetry. Without classroom assignments to prompt her, she listened to her doubts and was afraid to write something inferior. In an undated statement on poetics, she revealed that Kenneth Koch’s emphasis on freshness had stuck with her yet seemed to be an impediment: “At the height of my enthusiasm and freshness in poetry, I had no techniques or judgment—now I have a little techniques whatever that means and a little judgment, and I’ve lost my freshness—for the moment anyway.” She simultaneously questioned the idea that “good poetry should necessarily be astonishing and surprising all the time. The astonishment of one year is not that of another.” If that statement predicts her verse’s fall from critical favor, it also invites a reappraisal of Krauss’s poetry—its disregard for generic boundaries, its exuberant experimentation, and its curious blend of progressive education, children’s literature, and the twentieth-century avant-garde.11
In the early 1970s, however, Krauss remained a critical favorite. Albert Poland and Bruce Mailman’s The Off Off Broadway Book: The Plays, People, Theatre (1972) featured her work along with that of Amiri Baraka, John Guare, A. R. Gurney Jr., Terrence McNally, David Rabe, Sam Shepard, and Lanford Wilson. In late March 1973, Joseph Gifford offered There’s a Little Ambiguity over There among the Bluebells, an ambitious staging of her poetry at Boston University Theatre. The show was a multimedia experience. Accompanying the actors’ performance of Krauss’s poems, six large screens displayed projections of “a myriad of eclectic images from Picasso to Playboy,” as the Boston Phoenix’s Carolyn Clay noted. Clay declared that the show had “definite commercial possibilities” and constituted “a fascinating if frightening realm— one in which an effusive, slightly idiotic Bill Shakespeare can take a friendly tumble with a sluggish Winnie the Pooh, where Molly Bloom can reject Apollinaire for an NYU poetry student, where grotesquerie and naturalism are so adroitly fused that the boundaries cease to be evident.” The Boston Globe’s William A. Henry 3rd also praised the performance’s blurring of boundaries: “The collage of poetry, movement, hard-edged but lyrical music, bright, coordinated costumes … is a giddy delight…. Whimsy predominates on the surface of Bluebells. But … the playing of the poems suggests that the distortion of reality is frightening as well as funny.”12
In her illustrations for This Breast Gothic, Krauss strove more for funny than for scary. For the poetry chapbook’s cover image, she drew a portrait of a woman whose torso was made up entirely of breasts, with two stick legs sticking out below and with a head and waving arms on the top. Wild, explicit, and vibrant against its pink background, the image certainly shifts the possible meanings for the title poem, encouraging a reappraisal of lines like “This breast boom-boom yippee slurp strawberries cabañas / This breast as we go whizzing along,” and “This breast we have a fine view of everything that happens.” The poem suddenly seems an exuberant celebration of a woman’s power: from her breast comes life, food, art, literature, cities, history, news—everything.
While Krauss pursued art for its own sake, This Breast Gothic’s cover and title poem display her feminism. Krauss was a regular at events sponsored by Connecticut Feminists in the Arts, a group that sought to empower women to see “that we could create our own lives, that our lives could be more than our mothers’ lives.” That idea very much appealed to Krauss.13
Bookstore Press editor Gerald Hausman wanted to write a book called Hooray for Everyday: Conversations with Ruth Krauss and so spent a few hot, humid days, probably early in the summer of 1973, visiting her and Johnson in Westport. Outside, Krauss, dressed in a blue-and-white Japanese robe, lay on the sun deck, flat on her back, “her silvery shoulder-length hair let down,” her head propped up on two thick hardcover books, with handwritten pages “full of poems and scribbles” nearby. Inside the window-filled studio over the garage, Johnson spent the entire day painting, moving “gracefully, slowly, effortlessly … perfecting a geometric angle in blue or gray, demonstrating a theory that has been left untouched since the time of Archimedes.” In the evening, Johnson emerged wearing khaki shorts and no shirt and bearing “a small tankard of vodka and tomato juice” for his Bloody Mary. Out at dinner (Johnson now wearing a shirt), and Krauss’s “joyous” laughter attracted looks and smiles from tables away. The next morning, she and Hausman went out for breakfast at Franny’s, where she ate “spoonfuls of grape jelly, no toast, just good old gooey globs of grape.” Not having seen anyone do that since he was a summer camp counselor, Hausman thought, “Her white hair is the white hair of a child,” he writes.14
Krauss’s interest in the poetic imagination led her to a poetry discussion group founded in the early 1970s by Cynthia Luden. Every other Monday afternoon, participants read poetry ranging from Homer and Beowulf to contemporary poets such as Lucille Clifton. Krauss was the oldest member of a group that included photographer Barbara Lans; children’s author Freya Littledale; poets Janet Krauss and Ruth Good; and aspiring poets Peggy Heinrich and Peter Felsenstal. Enjoying the company of fellow lovers of poetry, Krauss would arrive, take off her shoes and socks, and join in the conversation until she fell asleep. The group nicknamed her the dormouse after the sleepy Mad Tea Party guest in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.15
Ruth Krauss, cover for This Breast Gothic (Lenox, Mass.: Bookstore, 1973). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Inspired by her conversations with Gerry Hausman, Krauss conducted some 1972 and 1973 poetry-writing workshops modeled loosely on Kenneth Koch’s classes. She did one in the Westport area and another in Lenox, Massachusetts, but turned down requests to do more in “too hard to get to pla
ces—Northern Pa—etc.” Participants would write a standard poetic form (such as a sestina) but “take end-words from some science (book or article).” Or they would “do a dialogue-poem using 2 incongruous characters,” possibly from literary sources. Writers could “‘team-up’ a human-made thing with a ‘natural’ one,” as in Krauss’s line, “sad as a shoe and no foot.” She wrote more than two dozen such prompts, all designed to ignite her students’ creativity.16
Early in the summer of 1973, Johnson met one of his creative partners when Gene and Zdenka Deitch visited Westport, admiring the new Johnson-Krauss home and Johnson’s paintings. Gene Deitch was then working on an animated adaptation of Harold’s Fairy Tale, also for Weston Woods. Johnson had been pleased with Deitch’s film of A Picture for Harold’s Room and responded warmly to the idea of more animated Harold films and even an animated Barnaby. An earlier Barnaby cartoon had won first prize at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, but Johnson thought it “much inferior” to Deitch’s work and was excited at the prospect of an adaptation that might live up to his exacting standards.17
For her part, Krauss was toying with the idea of a poetry collection that explored sexuality. In early August 1973, she sent her friends at the Bookstore Press a “rough of what the end-papers for [a] proposed sex-maniac book might look like.” At different angles, she juxtaposes lines of verse, including “This breast plumbers here ask five-hour day / This breast expelled from the universities for crazy” and “I / I take / I take off / I take off my clothes” and “summer is gone / the leaves are gone / and I am gone (torrents of gone) / on you.” She called the proposed book “my famous porm? collection,” combining the words porn and poem. The book was never published.18
At the end of the month, Ruth and Dave embarked from New York on another cruise—this one to the western Mediterranean, with stops in the Azores, Lisbon, Cadiz, Tangier, Ibiza, and Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, the home of Archimedes. One afternoon there, as Dave and Ruth sat in an outdoor cafe waiting for their lunch, he began thinking about the regular heptagon problem. On the table in front of him were a menu, a wine list, and a container of toothpicks. Turning his menu and wine list so that they formed the two equal sides of an isosceles triangle, he placed the toothpicks in a criss-cross pattern across the space in between these two sides. He then hypothesized that the angle where the menu and wine list intersected would be π/7 degrees. His supposition was correct. As J. B. Stroud has shown, this discovery permitted Johnson to “construct a regular seven-sided figure using a compass and straightedge with only one mark on it.” According to Stroud, “The details of how he did it are high school mathematics, but it’s not trivial. It’s darn clever.”19
Ruth and Dave continued on to Naples, Cannes, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, and Majorca, where Ruth grew overwhelmed by the pace of their travels. Still they sailed on, stopping in Alicante, Gibraltar, and Casablanca before finally returning to New York on 5 October. They arrived home exhausted and sick with colds, and Ruth soon developed laryngitis.20
As they recovered, Johnson began to write up the equation he had devised in Sicily, while Krauss resumed work on both Little Boat Lighter Than a Cork and the poetry collection that would become Under Thirteen. For both projects, she would work with smaller presses. In August 1973, Nordstrom stepped down as director of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls, and although Krauss had a Harper contract for Running Jumping ABC, delays in finding the right illustrator postponed the project. In late 1973, Scholastic published her first children’s book in three years, Everything under a Mushroom, which garnered mostly praise. In the New York Times Book Review, poet Karla Kuskin did not think that Krauss “succeeds here very well” but nonetheless considered her “a step ahead of many who write for children.” Publishers Weekly, however, praised the “inspired nonsense” in the book’s “series of glimpses of little ones at play…. It all adds up to enchantment.” Similarly, the Christian Science Monitor said the “glorious” book “sends us down below to a world of whimsy.”21
Johnson spent March and April 1974 mired in, as he put it, “an endless round of flu and colds and sinus treatments with anti-biotics worse than the ailment.” But he and Ruth were cheered by both the beginning of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon and the news that Deitch’s studios had finished what Johnson thought was a “beautiful” animated version of Harold’s Fairy Tale. Johnson was irritated, however, when he learned that the book had gone out of print, squandering the opportunity to sell copies in conjunction with the film’s release. Further inquiries revealed that although the book had gone out of print the previous year, Harpers had sold reprint rights to Reader’s Digest, and paperbacks would be out soon. Grumbling that publishers should keep authors informed about the status of their books, Johnson returned to painting and mathematics.22
Crockett Johnson with Heptagon from Its Seven Sides, ca. 1972. Photo by Jackie Curtis. Used by permission of Jackie Curtis.
As he worked on his construction for a regular heptagon, Johnson had been corresponding with the Mathematical Gazette and with scholars such as Harley Flanders, Howard Levi, and Stanley Smith, who were checking Johnson’s work and helping him refine his formula. In June 1974, the editor of the Mathematical Gazette, Douglas A. Quadling, wrote to Johnson, “This construction is certainly new to me, and would I am sure be of interest to Gazette readers. I’m glad that your perseverance has borne fruit.” Another mathematical triumph: His second original formula would be published.23
In the fall of 1974, Dave and Ruth returned to England, where the highlight of their trip was a visit with Smith and his wife, Gladys, in East Sussex. Too much of the rest of their time was spent in or near their hotel: Dave “couldn’t walk far because of a pulled calf muscle and … the worst weather in history swept the Channel coast.”24
In early February 1975, Dave went to the doctor. Perhaps his ailing leg prompted the visit. Or maybe that persistent cough had returned, and he was feeling short of breath. Five decades of smoking had caught up with him. He had lung cancer.
26
WHAT WOULD HAROLD DO?
Up and up, he went, into the dark.
—CROCKETT JOHNSON, Harold’s Trip to the Sky (1957)
The news of Dave’s cancer threw Ruth into a state of collapse. For thirty-five years, he had been the one person on whom she had allowed herself to depend. Life without him was inconceivable.1
At the end of the first week of February, Dave checked in to Norwalk Hospital. He learned that although the doctors there could not do much for him, there was some chance that more skilled surgeons elsewhere might be able to remove the cancerous parts of his lungs. Buoyed by this possibility, he managed to keep a sense of humor. When neighbor Doris Lund saw him just after the diagnosis, she asked, “How are you doing, Dave?” He replied, “They’re all rushing around, looking for the fastest switchblade in the West.”2
Gene Searchinger arranged for Dave to be seen at New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Dave and Ruth traveled there at the beginning of the second week of February. So that she would not have to commute from Westport, she stayed with their old friends, Nina and Herman Schneider. In early March, Dave had an operation to remove part of his lungs, and by 17 March, Ruth reported that he was “rapidly improving,” “pacing around (when not asleep),” and doing “whatever one does in hospitals while waiting (to get out).” Encouraged by his progress, Ruth wrote, “we hope to be home soon.”3
The operation’s ameliorative effects were temporary, however. After Dave recovered sufficiently from the surgery, the doctors ran some more tests, which showed that the cancer had already spread. Further operations would be both dangerously invasive and unlikely to succeed. Out of options, Sloan-Kettering sent Dave back to Westport. At home, Dave received many visitors. Ruth’s cousin, Dick Hahn, and his wife, Betty, drove up from Baltimore every weekend. Frank O’Hara’s sister, Maureen; Jackie Curtis; Shelley Trubowitz; Doris and Shelle
y Orgel; Stefan and Marion Schnabel; and other friends visited him regularly. As the cancer made him cough and shortened his breath, Dave had to slow down. He knew what was happening, and when he felt frustrated, he would say, “Oh, balls!”4
Crockett Johnson, advertisement for the American Cancer Society, 1958. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
By June, Dave was no longer able to live at home and was back at Norwalk Hospital. He remained hopeful, trying to eat to keep up his strength. He showed Jackie Curtis and her daughter, Karen, his new theorem, “A Construction for a Regular Heptagon,” just published in the Mathematical Gazette, and received the news that his painting Heptagon from Its Seven Sides—the artistic realization of that theorem—would be exhibited in the Smithsonian Institution’s Hall of Mathematics. He wanted to pursue other theorems and had plans to build more furniture. His once large body was wasting away, but his mind remained alert and active. Nevertheless, it was a daily struggle. “Oh, balls!” Talking to Searchinger on the phone from his hospital bed, Dave said, “I want to get out of here, one way or another.”5
By early July, the end was near. One evening, Gil Rose and Andy Rooney came to visit. They found Dave scared, in pain, and slipping in and out of consciousness. To help Dave deal with his anxiety and fear, Rose asked, “Well, what would Harold do?” Dave grew interested in looking at his illness from Harold’s perspective, and as he thought about what Harold would do, he calmed down.6
