by Philip Nel
Beyond the attention a writing group provided, Krauss simply enjoyed the company. In 1985, when Chadwick spoke of construction problems with her new house, Krauss was sympathetic, inviting her friend to move in temporarily. For the month that Chadwick stayed in the guest room, she would come home from work, open the front door, and hear Krauss call out jokingly from the kitchen, “My husband is home! My husband is home!” Krauss no longer ate unless someone else cooked. So, Chadwick prepared dinner each night as well as loaded and ran the dishwasher and saw to other domestic tasks that seemed beyond Krauss’s grasp.25
Though Dave had always taken care of anything practical, Ruth at times seemed to be craving not just her late spouse but a parent figure. When Chadwick asked why Krauss had never learned to do so many basic things, she claimed that she had been an indulged child-prodigy violinist and that no one had ever forced her to do anything. She remained determined that she would not be forced to do things now. She told friends that she had a “wonderful system” for taking care of her finances: “I put everything in this box, and Sidney [Kramer] takes care of it.” She also called Kramer if she needed to change a lightbulb or if her plumbing were acting up. When she needed a new car, Morton Schindel took her to a dealer, but Krauss was unable to decide. Schindel finally picked one out and said, “Look, this would be a good car for you,” and Krauss “never questioned it. She just got delivery of the car and paid the bill and drove that car for the rest of her life.” As Kramer said, “She was a luftmensch. She operated way up in the sky.”26
Though Krauss depended on others to help with life’s daily challenges, in other respects she remained a parent figure and mentor to younger people. In the fall of 1986, she returned to an idea she had had fifteen years earlier: having Nina Stagakis, the daughter of her old friends Phyllis Rowand and Gene Wallace, illustrate Running Jumping ABC. Influenced by Krauss’s poetry career, the ABC book is both whimsical and gently lyrical. For D, Krauss has “Dance with a leaf / Duckwalk all around the world / Draw your dreams on an old bathrobe / Dress up like the sun and stand on a mountain.” Y is “Yell ‘Good Morning Big Fat World!’” Scholastic senior editor Phyllis Hoffman loved the text and invited Krauss to send Stagakis’s drawings. Hoffman found the artwork “dear and kind of ‘Sendakian’ but …, at times, very awkward.” Stagakis submitted some new sketches, but Scholastic passed, and Running Jumping ABC remains unpublished.27
But for the first time in eight years, Krauss was working on a new picture book, Big and Little, and Scholastic liked it enough to send a contract. In consultation with editor-in-chief Jean Feiwel, Hoffman sought an illustrator for the book. Accustomed to working with Nordstrom at Harper and Hirschman at both Harper and Greenwillow, Krauss expected to be consulted. But the children’s book business had changed: It was less common for authors to have a say in choosing their illustrators. When the finished art arrived in late March 1987, Krauss was surprised and upset: Who was Mary Szilagyi, and why had she drawn only white children for Big and Little? Probably because of time constraints, Szilagyi refused to redo the illustrations to add a black child as a friend of the central character, and an angry Krauss vowed never to write for children again. Published in the fall of 1987, Big and Little would be Ruth’s final children’s book.28
At around that time, Krauss traveled to Baltimore to see a doctor about her hip because she was growing more frail. Ralph Nazareth, a poet she had met through Dale Shaw’s workshops, drove her down. A young man from India interested in American mores, Nazareth asked many questions. Krauss answered each with a whimsical comment. Just after they crossed into Maryland, they saw a sign for the town of Havre de Grace, and Krauss began chanting, “Havre de Grace.” Nazareth joined in. The town’s name made Krauss think of France, and she told Nazareth how exquisite and extraordinary the French were as lovers and how Americans did not know how to make love. Then she changed the subject again. It was, Nazareth recalled, a “very memorable trip.”29
In Baltimore, she stayed with Richard and Betty Hahn. Dave’s studio was empty again, and Ruth considered moving down to Baltimore, where she would be close to family. After spending about four weeks with the Hahns and pondering her options, she realized that she would not be able to drive in Baltimore, though she could still drive in Westport. She concluded that the best decision was to remain in her house but have people come in to help her, and she returned to Westport.30
Living alone (when she could not find a boarder) or with company (when she could), Krauss continued to write when inspiration struck and to curate her husband’s literary legacy. During the summer of 1989, Theatreworks USA’s Barbara Pasternack, composer-lyricist Jon Ehrlich, and adapter Jane Shepard came up to Westport to perform for her a musical adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon. Theatreworks USA had asked Ehrlich to adapt the book, and he believed that the company already had the rights, so he was surprised to discover that Krauss’s final approval was required. Confident that he had done a good job but a little anxious about her reaction, Ehrlich and Shepard talked and sang their way through the show in Krauss’s living room with her and a friend as the audience. To convey the idea that the drawings truly come alive, the play has four Purple People emerge as the result of Harold’s first scribbles: They embody what Harold draws (a dragon, an apple tree, the moon) or help display the action (turning Harold around in the air when he falls from the mountain). For an hour, Krauss listened and watched. When it was over, she gladly gave Ehrlich and Shepard permission to stage their play. The show made its debut at Broadway’s Promenade Theatre in November 1990 and then toured the country for a few seasons.31
At the end of the show, Harold draws himself into bed, drops his crayon, and falls asleep. Harold’s imagination guides him toward home and rest, but Ruth Krauss’s imagination guided her toward anxiety. In her big empty house, she could not feel fully at home, nor could she sleep soundly. Fourteen years after Dave’s death, Ruth still could not adapt to living alone.
28
CHILDREN ARE TO LOVE
—and when we pass a cemetery, we both
hold our breath alike, like twins,
even when we’re not together.
—RUTH KRAUSS, I’ll Be You and You Be Me (1954)
In the fall of 1989, Dave’s studio was empty again. When Nina Stagakis visited, Ruth asked whether she and her family could move in, living there rent-free in exchange for serving as her caretakers. Stagakis realized that having the five members of her family living in a single room would be impractical. So Ruth placed another ad in the paper.1
The ad was answered by Joanna Czaderna, a Polish immigrant who was seven months pregnant at the time. Although she was employed, she was having difficulty finding a place to live because landlords refused to rent to a pregnant woman. But when she knocked on the door of 24 Owenoke, Ruth opened it and said, “Oh, welcome! So, where is your stuff?” Czaderna and her husband, Janusz, became a part of the household, followed by their daughter, Bianca, who arrived in December 1989. Needing to care for her newborn as well as her mentally unstable husband, Czaderna was unable to work, and she began to worry about how she would afford the rent. Though she did not raise the matter, Ruth understood and offered to let the Czadernas stay for free if Joanna would help around the house. The younger woman gratefully agreed.2
Ruth’s other friends wondered how she would adapt to having an infant in the household, but much to their surprise, she enjoyed Bianca’s company. A very easygoing baby, Bianca would play quietly next to her mother and Ruth, and when the girl got older, she would crawl over and sit in the eighty-nine-year-old author’s lap, where Ruth would hug her “little angel.” Ruth would also read her books to Bianca, the grandchild she never had.3
Joanna Czaderna became Ruth’s confidant and chauffeur. Traveling in Ruth’s little Honda, they began to visit the places Ruth had lived and worked— the Rowayton house, the schools where had interviewed children. She finally became able to talk about Dave without being overcome by grief. Her
face lighting up, Ruth described Dave as a gentleman who treated her like a princess. Czaderna was surprised: “I just never heard anyone speaking with such a love about another person, and especially coming from her, it was even more powerful to me.”4
Returning to one of her favorite childhood activities, Ruth began making books for her own amusement—writing the story, drawing the pictures, and sewing the pages together with yarn. In one of these stories, a variation on “Love Song for Elephants” from I’ll Be You and You Be Me, she wrote of a stuffed elephant who grows old, gets worn out, and is thrown in the garbage. A little girl finds the sad elephant, takes him home, and repairs him.5
In July 1992, Ruth’s good health suddenly deserted her, and she took to her bed, requiring round-the-clock care. Nurses came in for a few hours each day, but Czaderna became her primary caregiver. Helplessness devastated Ruth, and she fought to lift herself out of bed, though she lacked the strength. Her body was failing, but her will remained strong.6
Friends and fans came to visit. Barbara Lans, Lillian Hoban, Morton Schindel, and Maureen O’Hara came regularly. Maurice Sendak visited several times, and Shel Silverstein visited once. Ruth began giving things away. When Dan Richter stopped by, she gave him some of Dave’s books—Boswell’s Life of Johnson and a book on seventeenth-century thought.7
Another regular visitor, Janet Krauss, was struck by Ruth’s humor and defiance. When Janet mentioned that she was going to attend a poetry festival, Ruth asked, “A poverty festival?” “No, a poetry festival,” Janet replied. “Oh, those things,” Ruth laughed, enjoying the misheard phrase. After sitting at Ruth’s bedside and noticing her fist, Janet composed a poem comparing Ruth to “an aged Barbie doll / with flowing white hair,” and asks, “Why do you never let go / let your hand fly open? / A fist of anger / or defiance / against your still life.” Bianca and Joanna Czaderna also sat with Ruth, but she was hard to comfort. She was frustrated, imprisoned by a body she could no longer control. She ultimately stopped fighting and simply lay in bed, waiting for the end.8
Aware that Ruth might not last much longer, Maureen O’Hara phoned Sendak to suggest that he come back for a final visit. Ruth was annoyed that O’Hara had made the call, and when Sendak arrived, she ignored him. He tried making conversation but got no response, and he was not sure if Ruth even recognized him. As he prepared to go, he leaned over and asked, “Could I kiss you goodbye?”
Ruth Krauss, late 1980s. Courtesy of Betty Hahn.
She did not object. He gently took her chin in his hand and kissed her on the lips. She giggled, and said, “Oh, Maury.” Sendak recalled, “I can’t tell you how much that meant. That she knew it was me all the time and that I had done just what she would have liked me to have done—to not have treated her like a dying person, but to have treated her like the beautiful woman that she was.”9
On 9 July 1993, Czaderna could see that Ruth was fading. Czaderna sat up with her friend all night and into the next day, stepping outside into the sunshine for a walk with her daughter only after one of the nurses arrived to tend to Ruth. When Joanna and Bianca returned, the nurse told them that Ruth had died. Three-and-a-half-year-old Bianca refused to leave Ruth’s side until the coroner came to take away her body.10
Ruth died on 10 July, one day before the eighteenth anniversary of Dave’s death and two weeks shy of what would have been her ninety-second birthday. The New York Times ran a short, error-laden obituary, suggesting that her life, though noteworthy, did not merit some basic fact-checking. The paper did, however, get her age correct.11
When Valerie Harms had asked fifteen years earlier whether Ruth ever thought of her creations as having an immortality of their own, Ruth responded, “How long can anything last? Especially in this time of space travel and exploration of other parts of the universe, posterity means nothing.” Amending her statement slightly, Ruth added, “Everything of course has repercussions or, rather, intersects with everything.”12
Conscious of those repercussions, Ruth did not forget the people and ideals that were important to her. She had finally made a will in early 1991, after decades of avoiding the subject. She consulted her cousin, Dick Hahn, and his wife, Betty, and initially planned to leave her entire estate to him. When he said he did not want her money, she made other arrangements. Bianca Czaderna received fifty thousand dollars to help with her education. Crockett Johnson’s paintings went to the Mathematical Division of the Smithsonian Institution. Ruth Krauss left the remainder of her estate (which also included Johnson’s estate) to charitable “organizations which are dedicated to meeting the needs of homeless children in the United States,” stipulating only that the organizations “have no particular religious affiliation.” As she had written forty years earlier in A Hole Is to Dig, “Children are to love.”13
At the time of Ruth’s death, Sendak’s new book about homeless children, We’re All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, was in production. When working on the book, Sendak found himself “going back to the A Hole Is to Dig kids.” He had been “unnerved” by reports of homeless children in “Venezuela, South America, children being killed on the street by police like rats and vermin.” Thoughts of these kids “brought [him] back to the happy little ragamuffins in the Krauss books.” We’re All in the Dumps was released in the fall, and the cover of the 27 September issue of the New Yorker featured a Sendak illustration of the book’s homeless children. Sleeping on the ground, a boy uses A Hole Is to Dig as a pillow. Standing beneath a makeshift shelter is a girl who has Ruth Krauss’s dark curly hair and who is holding a copy of I Can Fly. The girl’s eyes are closed, as if dreaming of flying.14
Sendak was unable to attend her memorial service but sent a loving reminiscence that Hoban read at the gathering and that formed the basis of his appreciation of Krauss published in the Horn Book the following year. Sendak said, “Ruth broke rules and invented new ones, and her respect for the natural ferocity of children bloomed into poetry that was utterly faithful to what was true in their lives.” Remy Charlip, who also could not attend the service, sent a piece in which he spoke of how Krauss inspired him. When he asked where she had come up with the wonderful title “The Song of the Melancholy Dress,” Krauss replied, “I misunderstood a woman at a party, who told me she just bought a melon-colored dress.” So, Charlip concluded, “Ruth taught me how to use my misunderstandings and my so-called failures and mistakes. And in the process I learned how to respect other people’s creative interpretations of what I say or do. For this path to artful enlightenment, I will be forever grateful to Ruth.”15
In accordance with Ruth’s wishes, she was cremated and her ashes scattered in Long Island Sound. At 5:00 A.M., on 21 June 1994, the day of the summer solstice, Ruth’s executor, attorney Stewart Edelstein, got into a canoe in Fairfield, Connecticut, and paddled out onto the sound. Dave had loved to sail there. For more than three decades, Ruth and Dave had lived together on the shore. And nineteen years earlier, his ashes had been scattered there. If Dave’s spirit were anywhere, it would be there.16
Out on the water, Edelstein recalled one of several visits to Ruth’s house, during which they ate cookies and worked on her will. Either he or Ruth had said something funny, and Ruth laughed—not a polite laugh, but a deep belly laugh. He thought of that moment, and “it was like she was there with me.” As he scattered Ruth’s ashes into the water, the sun rose.17
EPILOGUE
The handclapping and cheering went on even after the lion fell off the table and lay on the floor again and it continued until everyone forgot who the applause was for or what it was he was famous for having done.
—CROCKETT JOHNSON, Ellen’s Lion (1959)
In the decades since their deaths, Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson have receded in the public memory, she more quickly than he. Where once her poetic and dramatic achievements ranked among the best of the contemporary avant-garde, they are today a footnote to her better-known career as children’s author. That career, too, does not shine as brightly a
s it once did. All of her poetry is out of print, and less than a dozen of her thirty-six children’s books remain available.
However, new editions of some of her books have been published. The Bundle Book (1951) gained new life as You’re Just What I Need (illustrated by Julia Noonan, 1999); Eyes Nose Fingers Toes (1964) returned as Goodnight Goodnight Sleepyhead (illustrated by Jane Dyer, 2004); and Big and Little reappeared as And I Love You (illustrated by Steven Kellogg, 2010). In 2005, Maurice Sendak reworked Bears (1948), using new pictures featuring Max from Where the Wild Things Are to create a story that runs parallel to and intersects with Krauss’s original verse. He dedicated the new volume to Krauss and Johnson. In 2007, Helen Oxenbury’s art gave a fresh look to The Growing Story (1947), and the New York Review of Books’ Children’s Books imprint brought The Backward Day (1950) back into print.
While these republications augur well for Krauss’s literary legacy, Johnson has far better name recognition for two reasons. First, his comic garners much more respect than her poetry. Barnaby ranks among the twentieth century’s classic comic strips, alongside Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. Moreover, Barnaby has prominent fans ready to speak on its behalf. Pulitzer Prize–winner Art Spiegelman and New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly included Barnaby in the second of their three-volume Little Lit series (2000–2003). Daniel Clowes, best known for his Ghost World graphic novel (1997) and film (2001), frequently cites the strip as a favorite, even alluding to Barnaby in his graphic novel, Ice Haven (2005). Though the Comics Journal ranked Barnaby only at number 68 in its Top 100 Comics of the twentieth century, the issue’s cover featured two Barnaby characters, O’Malley and Gus the Ghost.1
