Wild Things!

by Betsy Bird

  Author George Selden had what one might consider a wide-ranging career. The 1974 novel The Story of Harold is proof enough of that. It was described by Kirkus in its day as “a sometimes appealing, often funny, vaguely outrageous and quasi-erotic parable about a not-so-untypical New Yorker trying to arrange the various pieces of his life.”

  The book is, of course, fiction, yet reviewers had a hard time not drawing connections to the author’s real life. This is understandable. Written under the pseudonym “Terry Andrews” (who appears in the book as himself), the novel is ostensibly about a children’s author who wrote the titular The Story of Harold. When couples call him up for threesomes (for lack of a more delicate term), they make a point of saying “Our kids love Harold.” After the bedding, the parents also make a point to have Mr. Andrews sign the book for their children. Says he, “I inherited a little money, but I make a living — or rather I support myself: it isn’t what you’d call a life — by writing children’s books.”

  Something to make you think twice about your signed copy of Cricket.

  A far cry from The Cricket in Times Square

  Image Credit 14

  Everyone knows those Berenstain Bears. This picture-book series features a family of anthropomorphic, country-living bears — Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Brother Bear, Sister Bear, and an additional baby Bear later on down the road — who act as ambassadors of uplifting, wholesome messages about life, Little League, Easter surprises, bullies, and the dangers of too much junk food. The books are unapologetic in their didacticism. In a 2003 article from America’s favorite source for snark, The Onion — “Precocious Six-Year-Old Claims Berenstain Bears Book Changed Her Life” — elementary-age Melody Johnson is quoted as saying, “The Berenstain Bears taught me about not being greedy. I used to have the ‘galloping greedy gimmes,’ but not anymore.”

  So would you be surprised to learn that in 1963, just one year after publishing The Big Honey Hunt, their first children’s book featuring the earnest family of bears, Stan and Jan Berenstain released the profoundly puckish What Dr. Freud Didn’t Tell You, a facts-of-life guide for grown-ups? It’s now out of print, so you’ll be lucky if you run across it at the flea market. A bawdy, suggestive, often sexist and broad-humored series of cartoons, it elucidates the point at which the “opposite sex becomes overt” for children, as well as male-female development and boy-girl relationships, as seen through the lens of lustfulness. For the remainder of the book, the famous couple relentlessly mock engagement, marriage, and sex, exploring the male and female impulse; sexual inhibitions (or the lack thereof); what really happens after ten weeks of marriage; the psychology of sex; fantasy life, both pre- and post-marriage; and much more. This is from the same folks who brought us such books as The Berenstain Bears Say Their Prayers and The Berenstain Bears Go to Sunday School — and whose books are now published by Zonderkidz, the children’s division of the Christian publishing house Zondervan.

  Don’t you just love surprises? We could bear-ly believe it.

  Death

  Published in 1807, Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare has remained in print for over two centuries. Nearly every children’s library owns it. It’s even available on Kindle. The book contains twenty stories based on some of William Shakespeare’s best-known plays, including three especially bloody tales — Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet. Who could imagine that one of its authors had a life story that was equally drenched in blood and gore?

  Mary Lamb was born in London in 1764. When her younger brother Charles came along eleven years later, Mary taught him to read at an especially early age. A boarding-school friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles left formal education behind at age fourteen and eventually spent more than thirty years working as a clerk for the East India Company while simultaneously pursuing solitary literary pursuits as a poet and essayist. Both the Lamb siblings suffered from mental problems. Charles once spent a few weeks in a psychiatric hospital and was known to keep a just-in-case straitjacket handy, should Mary go off the deep end and need to be restrained. Unfortunately, she wasn’t wearing the jacket that day in 1796 when, “worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night,” Mary violently attacked the family maid and her father before hacking her mother to death with a table knife. Some accounts state that she used a fork instead. Whatever the case, it was a piece of cutlery — and it was sharp enough to serve Mary’s murderous intent.

  A few modern-day researchers have referred to Mary Lamb as being “bipolar.” Perhaps. The courts took a surprisingly lenient stance on the case, deciding that Mary’s acts were caused by “lunacy” and giving Charles full custody of his sister. He kept her in a private hospital for a few years and then brought her home, where — with the exception of a few stays in mental institutions when things got particularly bad — the two siblings lived happily and enjoyed many highly cultured and socially connected friends. They were even permitted to adopt a child together.

  As writing partners, Charles and Mary achieved lasting fame by adapting the plays of William Shakespeare in a collection notable for its clarity, for avoiding words and language introduced after Shakespeare’s time, and for shunning the sermonizing and moralizing ubiquitous in most children’s books of the era. Although Mary’s name did not appear on the cover or title page of the first edition, we do know this was a collaborative effort, with Charles writing the tragedies and Mary — ironically, considering her troubled life — writing the comedies. A year after publishing Tales from Shakespeare, the Lambs released another children’s book, Mrs. Leicester’s School. Highly praised at the time, it never achieved the classic status of their Shakespeare adaptations. Nevertheless, the format of their second volume, written in the varied first-person voices of ten young girls and similar to the multi-voice narratives used by authors such as Paul Fleischman (Seedfolks; Whirligig) today, is stylistically impressive.

  Charles Lamb died in 1834 and was buried in All Saints’ Churchyard, Edmonton, Greater London. Nearly thirteen years later, his older sister was buried beside him. They share a tombstone. Since their deaths, most editions of Tales from Shakespeare have avoided mentioning their family tragedy — though an occasional reissue does tell that tale. And then there are those that remain discreet, such as the 1878 edition, which alludes only to the siblings “living beneath the shadow, which never lifted, of a great family sorrow.”

  It’s heartening to realize that these two troubled individuals were able to — at least briefly — emerge from that shadow and, in the words of one critic, discover “one of their best consolations in breathing together the pure and bracing air of the Elizabethan poetry.” In doing so, they created a book that will never die.

  One of the biggest Laura Ingalls Wilder mysteries concerns a story that did not appear in her Little House series. A story that contains actual honest-to-goodness serial killers.

  The incident appeared first in Rose Wilder Lane’s revision of “Pioneer Girl” and is presented in a rather oblique fashion. Note the use of the first-person voice (the novels would eventually be written in omniscient prose):

  One night just about sundown a strange man came riding his horse up to the door on a run. Pa hurried out and they talked a few minutes. Then the man went away as fast as he had come, and Pa came into the house in a hurry. He would not wait for supper, but asked Ma to give him a bite to eat right away, saying he must go. Something horrible had happened at Benders.

  Ma put bread, meat, and some of those good pickles on the table, and Pa talked while he ate. Mary and I hung at the table’s edge, looking at the pickles. I heard Pa say “dead,” and thought somebody at Benders was dead. Pa said, “Already twenty or more, in the cellar.” He said, “Benders — where I stopped for a drink. She asked me to come in.”

  Ma said, “Oh Charles, thank God!”

  I did not understand and felt confused. Mary kept asking Ma why she thanked God, and Ma did not answer. . . . Then Pa said, “Th
ey found a little girl, no bigger than Laura. They’d thrown her in on top of her father and mother and tramped the ground down on them, while the little girl was still alive.”

  I screamed, and Ma told Pa he should have known better.

  The Benders, also known as the Bloody Benders, were a real-life family of murderers living in Kansas during the pioneer era. In 1937, Laura was invited to a Book Week celebration in Detroit, where she gave a speech at the famous J. L. Hudson department store. In the presentation, she discussed topics that are inappropriate for children’s books — and then expounded on the Bender story:

  There were Kate Bender and two men, her brothers, in the family and their tavern was the only place for travelers to stop on the road south from Independence. People disappeared on that road. Leaving Independence and going south they were never heard of again. It was thought they were killed by Indians but no bodies were ever found.

  Then it was noticed that the Benders’ garden was always freshly plowed but never planted. People wondered. And then a man came from the east looking for his brother, who was missing. . . .

  In the cellar underneath was the body of a man whose head had been crushed by the hammer. It appeared that he had been seated at the table back to the curtain and had been struck from behind it. A grave was partly dug in the garden with a shovel close by. The posse searched the garden and dug up human bones and bodies. One body was that of a little girl who had been buried alive with her murdered parents. The garden was truly a graveyard kept plowed so it would show no signs. The night of the day the bodies were found a neighbor rode up to our house and talked earnestly with Pa. Pa took his rifle down from its place over the door and said to Ma, “The vigilantes are called out.” Then he saddled a horse and rode away with the neighbor. It was late the next day when he came back and he never told us where he had been. For several years there was more or less a hunt for the Benders and reports that they had been seen here or there. At such times Pa always said in a strange tone of finality, “They will never be found.” They were never found and later I formed my own conclusions why.

  It’s a chilling story, and one can see why Wilder would not want to include it in her homespun tales for children. Just the detail of the little girl being buried alive would have caused nightmares for many young readers.

  Then there’s that niggling little detail of the story’s veracity.

  Yes, the Bender family really did exist in Labette County, Kansas, and they are said to have violently killed more than twenty individuals — making them among the country’s first, and worst, mass murderers. When their crimes were uncovered, the “Bloody Benders” fled town, but rumors persist that they were tracked down by vigilantes and treated to some old-fashioned country justice.

  Was Pa one of those vigilantes?

  Impossible.

  The Ingallses left Kansas in 1871, and the crimes of the Bender family were not exposed until 1873.

  So there is the mystery: Why in the world would Laura make such a claim when it was absolutely not true?

  And what does it say about the general veracity of the author’s work?

  Hey, now we’re starting to wonder if Nellie Oleson even existed.

  They may be some of the most beloved characters in children’s literature, but that fact helped them not at all.

  Robert McCloskey snagged the Caldecott Medal for not one, but two, books in his career, the first one being Make Way for Ducklings, published in 1941. At the time of its creation, McCloskey shared a studio on West Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village with fellow illustrator Marc Simont. To prep, McCloskey spent years drawing. At first working only with stuffed mallards, he eventually turned to live ducklings, two sets he purchased in the Washington Square Market in New York and in Boston. At one time, McCloskey and Simont had no fewer than sixteen ducks living with them, twelve of them ducklings and not a one of them cooperative. (For one thing, they would huddle as a group, instead of lining up, as McCloskey had hoped.) With his sketchbook and box of Kleenex in hand, McCloskey spent many weeks on his hands and knees, following the ducks and observing their behavior. And that includes their behavior in the tub in order to observe them as they swam. This resulted in some disgruntled downstairs neighbors after an unfortunate incident of overflowing water.

  McCloskey’s quick fix for the ducks’ unruliness and hyperactivity was an unusual one indeed: red wine. The ducks loved it, not to mention it slowed them down considerably. One of the male mallards, McCloskey later noted, became so enamored of the red wine that he would chase away the female ducks in order to have the lion’s share.

  And did the ducks remain beloved pets in the McCloskey/Simont studio? Did the studio-mates bedeck their pets in down vests and celebrate their duck birthdays with cheese and quackers? No, McCloskey attempted to sell them to a butcher! “Bob McCloskey,” Simont said, “could never have passed as a native New Yorker. He had Middle West written all over him, complete with large frame, crew cut, and honest face. All these attributes are well-received in most places, but not necessarily when you’re trying to sell some ducks to a New York butcher. ‘They’ll probably try to gyp me,’ I remember him saying when he left the studio with the ducks, ‘but I don’t care. I’ll take anything they give me.’ When he came back to the studio hours later, still with the ducks, he looked terrible. ‘I couldn’t sell them,’ he said, ‘so I tried to give them away and that was worse.’” Indeed, he had attempted to return them to the stall in Washington Square where his original purchase had been made, and they wouldn’t take them back.

  Finally, McCloskey took the ducks to a friend’s farm in Connecticut, and they were placed in a wire pen at the back of a field. Sadly, the ducklings attracted the attention of neighboring foxes (such is the circle of life), and after only a few days, all were eaten, “a most unhappy ending for the ducklings,” said McCloskey biographer Gary D. Schmidt, “and why, when I read the shift into the present tense at the end of Make Way for Ducklings, I am so moved, since they seem to be eternally swimming behind the swan boats in this book.”

  Some deaths come so unexpectedly to such young artists that the shock reverberates long after they are gone. Such was the case with the great picture-book author Margaret Wise Brown. While in France (and engaged to be wed to a Rockefeller), Brown suffered stomach pains and was immediately rushed to a hospital in Nice. She had an ovarian cyst removed, as well as her appendix, and everything appeared to be just fine. She seemed to be recovering nicely, and she took time to get her letter writing done while she recovered. In fact, two weeks later, she was downright cheery. Potential plans were under way to meet her fiancé in Panama and marry him there. Then, on November 13, when the nurse came in to check on her, Margaret displayed her health and wellness by kicking her leg over her head as if she were in a prone cancan lineup.

  Then she blacked out.

  Of all the lousy luck, an embolism had formed in that particular limb. So when Ms. Brown kicked her leg over her head, it promptly dislodged and went straight for her brain. Moments later, she was dead at the young age of forty-two.

  For years after Brown’s death, copies of Goodnight Moon would refer to her death on the dust jacket as happening “while still a young woman.” One cannot help but wonder whether that line mystified or terrified the scores of young readers who came across it in their travels.

  Brown’s death brings us directly to one of the strangest cases of inheritance ever to grace the world of children’s literature. It is known, but not widely reported, that when Goodnight Moon was first released, it was, at best, a moderate success. People envision this book as a blockbuster from moment one, but in fact it experienced a relatively subdued beginning. At 6,000 copies the first fall, sales dipped to 1,300 by 1951.

  Maybe this is why Ms. Brown chose to dispose of her royalties in the way that she did. In her will, a strange provision was made to an eight-year-old boy, not even related to Ms. Brown. As stated, all future earnings from Ms. Brown’s books that were published
during her lifetime, including Goodnight Moon, went to young Albert Edward Clarke III. Clarke was one of three children, all sons, of Margaret’s friend Joan MacCormick. There was a great deal of speculation as to why Ms. Brown chose Albert, the middle child, as her de facto heir. Some thought it might be because he looked like the kind of kid Ms. Brown would have had herself. Albert himself had a different theory, years later, that was far less romantic. He says that when he was twelve he eavesdropped on his mother, who was speaking to his aunt:

  She says Margaret Wise Brown has left Alby an inheritance. She’s left him about $15,000. And did you know that Margaret Wise Brown is his real biological mother?

  No one in Clarke’s family credits this claim and, as Margaret Wise Brown scholar Leonard Marcus says, “It’s the kind of thing that would have come out.” Whatever the reasons, Ms. Brown did indeed write the will in Alby’s favor, and well before she felt as if she might have any reason to die. The result of that bit of unforeseen charity has been a life of excess and tragedy. After 1953, sales of Goodnight Moon started to pick up again. Suddenly, Brown’s legacy was beginning to be worth something significant. Albert, meanwhile, had dropped out of high school, gotten kicked out of the marines, been arrested for burglary and vagrancy, and all this before he hit age twenty-one, when he actually got his hands on the $75,000 that had accrued since Brown’s death. Money didn’t make anything better for him, though. After coming into his inheritance, Albert was arrested for marijuana possession, attempted burglary, and “malicious mischief.”

  As Mr. Clarke has said about the book himself, “If it wasn’t for the fact that Margaret Wise Brown left me an inheritance, who knows? I could’ve been a homeless person. I could’ve been a poor, broken-down homeless person.”