The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  Stuart Little was published in October 1945. The book’s pictures, by Garth Williams, share with its story a kind of quiet tenderness, hushed but somehow breezy, too. (Nordstrom and White had rejected seven other illustrators, whose mice looked too much like Mickey.) On the cover, little Stuart, in his shorts and shirtsleeves, paddling his canoe—a boat named Summer Memories—is at once so tiny and so grown-up that he might just as well have illustrated White’s wistful 1941 essay “Once More to the Lake,” about going camping with his son at a place in Maine where he once went with his father and in which White comes to realize that he isn’t so sure, anymore, just who is who: “Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.”62

  On page 1, the most disappointing book Anne Carroll Moore ever read begins with these words:

  When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son was born, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. The truth of the matter was, the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way. He was only about two inches high; and he had a mouse’s sharp nose, a mouse’s tail, a mouse’s whiskers, and the pleasant, shy manner of a mouse.63

  Two days after Stuart Little was published, an unhappy Harold Ross stopped by White’s office at the New Yorker. White recalled Ross’s reaction:

  “Saw your book, White,” he growled. “You made one serious mistake.”

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Why the mouse!” he shouted. “You said he was born. God damn it, White, you should have had him adopted.”

  Next, Edmund Wilson stopped White in the hall. “I read that book of yours,” he began. “I found the first page quite amusing, about the mouse, you know. But I was disappointed that you didn’t develop the theme more in the manner of Kafka.”

  About all this—“the editor who could spot a dubious verb at forty paces, the critic who was saddened because my innocent tale of the quest for beauty failed to carry the overtones of monstrosity”—White tried to laugh.64 But then Malcolm Cowley, reviewing the book in the Times, proved skeptical, too: “Mr. White has a tendency to write amusing scenes instead of telling a story. To say that ‘Stuart Little’ is one of the best children’s books published this year is very modest praise for a writer of his talent.”65

  The real blow came when Frances Clarke Sayers, acting on Moore’s orders, refused to buy Stuart Little for the library, sending a signal to children’s librarians across the country: “Not recommended for purchase by expert.”66 In November, a syndicated New York Post columnist squibbed, “There will be a to-do about the New York Public Library’s reluctance to accept ‘Stuart Little.’ ”67 For this unsavory gossip, White graciously apologized in a letter to Frances Sayers in November, assuring her that neither he nor Nordstrom had planted the notice to apply pressure, and that he much regretted the appearance of “dark and terrible goings on in the world of juvenile letters.”68

  One way to read Stuart Little is as an indictment of both the childishness of children’s literature and the juvenilization of American culture. It might justifiably have been titled The Birth of an Adult. Whether Mrs. Frederick C. Little had given birth to a mouse or to a creature that just looked like a mouse was, especially in 1945, poignant social commentary. Just after the book came out, White wrote to Nordstrom asking her not to call Stuart a mouse in advertisements, noting, “He is a small guy who looks very much like a mouse, but he obviously is not a mouse.” Later in the letter, though, White appears to suddenly realize that he himself had called Stuart a mouse on page 36: “I just found it.… Anyway, you see what I mean.”69 The one thing Stuart wasn’t was a baby. Page 2: “Unlike most babies, Stuart could walk as soon as he was born.” No bottles, no diapers, no nighttime feedings, no prams, no cribs (“Mr. Little made him a tiny bed out of four clothespins and a cigarette box”). No baby talk. No board books. From the first, Stuart dressed himself and was helpful around the house. His biggest problem was that he was too little to turn on the tap to brush his teeth. His parents’ biggest problem was that “mice” were so badly treated in children’s books. Tsk-tsk. Mr. Little “made Mrs. Little tear from the nursery songbook the page about the ‘Three Blind Mice, See How They Run,’ ” something Mr. Little, Anne Carroll Moore–like, Annie Dollard–like, deemed too mousy for his second son. From books written for people bigger than him, Stuart needed to be protected.

  “I don’t want Stuart to get a lot of notions in his head,” said Mr. Little. “I should feel badly to have my son grow up fearing that a farmer’s wife was going to cut off his tail with a carving knife. It is such things that make children dream bad dreams when they go to bed at night.”70

  The Littles also questioned the suitability, the mouse-appropriateness, of “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” in which not a creature stirs, not even a mouse. “I think it might embarrass Stuart to hear mice mentioned in such a belittling manner,” Mrs. Little told her husband. They settled, at last, on another kind of bowdlerizing:

  When Christmas came around Mrs. Little carefully rubbed out the word mouse from the poem and wrote in the word louse, and Stuart always thought that the poem went this way:

  ’Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house

  Not a creature was stirring, not even a louse.

  Tearing the pages out of books and rubbing out words that might worry their little one—it was just what Katharine White had been complaining about (“Children can take subordinate clauses in their stride,” she once insisted).71 Her “Children’s Shelf” column for 1946, a very thinly veiled repudiation of Stuart Little, offered a lament about writers who “are careful never to approach the child except in a childlike manner. Let us not overstimulate his mind, or scare him, or leave him in doubt, these authors and their books seem to be saying; let us affirm.”72

  Stuart Little leaves you in doubt, a good deal of doubt, really; it doesn’t end so much as it’s just, abruptly, over. In chapter 8, Stuart falls in love with a bird named Margalo, and when she flies away he goes on a quest. In the book’s last chapter, he stops his coupe at a filling station and buys five drops of gas. In a ditch alongside the road, he meets a repairman, preparing to climb a telephone pole. “I wish you fair skies and a tight grip” is Stuart’s fond wish. “I hope you find that bird,” the repairman says. Then come the book’s final, distressing lines:

  Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north. The sun was just coming up over the hills on his right. As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.73

  Stuart Little isn’t Gregor Samsa. He’s Don Quixote, turning into Holden Caulfield.

  Anne Carroll Moore tried very hard to ensure that schools would ban Stuart Little. Some did. But some schoolteachers decided, instead, to teach the book. In February 1946, a fifth-grade teacher in Glencoe, Illinois, assigned her students the task of writing a different ending. Susan Alder managed, with felicitous economy, to get to a happy ending in just nine paragraphs:

  After talking to the repairman, Stuart took the road heading north. “Chug chug” went his car. “Five drops running out,” thought Stuart. “I’ll stop at that filling station just ahead.” So he drove in.

  “What do you want?” said the man.

  “Five and one-half drops,” said Stuart. “The last five drops I got didn’t take me as far as I wanted to go.” Just then Stuart saw a bird hop out of the filling station.

  “This is Margalo,” said the man. “MARGALO!” yelled Stuart. “You must know each other,” said the man.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” said Stuart. “I’ll give you a whole ten dollars if you’ll let me have your bird.”

  “It’s a deal,” said the man.

  “Hop in, Margalo,” said Stuart and away they went. They were married back in New York and raised a family of half mice and half birds.74
<
br />   Susan Alder cleared that fence by a good three feet.

  And the New York Public Library? Did the mouse scamper past the lions? In December, the library’s director, Franklin Hopper, invited Louise Seaman Bechtel, the pioneering editor of children’s books at Macmillan, to deliver an endowed lecture on book publishing. To her friend Katharine White, Bechtel pledged that if she couldn’t prove to Frances Sayers that “S.L. is a great book,” she would eat the Sunday paper. At the library, Bechtel discovered that although Sayers had bought a copy of Stuart Little, she kept it under her desk. Bechtel grabbed the book and took it to Hopper’s office. She told him to read it. He did, and wrote to Bechtel the next day. He liked it very much. He was furious: “Have those who talk about its abnormalities no imagination?” Did Anne Carroll Moore think she could rule his library from the goddamn Grosvenor? Hopper ordered Sayers to take Stuart out of his hiding place. “He got into the shelves of the Library all right,” E. B. White wrote, “but I think he had to gnaw his way in.”75

  For a while, many American libraries did ban Stuart Little. But the best librarians, like the best schoolteachers, have a genius all their own. In March 1946, the seventh graders at the Clifton School, in Cincinnati, Ohio, posted a letter:

  Dear Mr. White:

  We have just finished your book “Stuart Little.” Our school librarian asked us to read it to help decide whether it would be a good book for the library. We think it would be.76

  It’s a quiet little letter. But that noise, the scritch-scratch of pen across paper, those thirty-eight seventh graders signing their names at the bottom of that letter? That’s the sound of a horse falling down.

  In January 1946, when Louise Bechtel delivered her lecture at the New York Public Library, Anne Carroll Moore was sitting in the front row, glaring. Undaunted, Bechtel made a point of plugging Stuart Little, saying, “I hope it gets all possible awards and medals.” Moore made her disapproval known. “E.B.W. will be tickled to hear that A.C.M. sent me a blast,” Bechtel wrote to Katharine afterward.77 Very likely, he wasn’t so tickled. He didn’t much like the dark and terrible goings-on in the world of juvenile letters.

  Moore, in her rage, fallen but still kicking, seems to have used her influence to shut Stuart Little out of the Newbery Medal, a prize named after the eighteenth-century printer of Little Goody Two-Shoes and awarded by a panel of librarians, including, that year, Frances Clarke Sayers. White’s book was not even among the four runners-up. The day after the awards were announced, Bechtel was “still grinding my teeth in rage,” she wrote to Katharine White, complaining about “these stupid un-literary women in charge” and suggesting that Nordstrom ought to have stamped on Stuart Little’s jacket, “The book all children of all ages love, that did not get the Newbery.” (“Thank you for your gratifying grinding of teeth,” Katharine wrote back.)78

  Harper headed Moore’s criticism off at the pass. “Some people—those who think they understand a thing if they can paste a neat label on it—will call ‘Stuart Little’ a juvenile,” the press’s publicity material read. “They will be right. They will also be wrong.” In December 1946, while Katharine White was ushering J. D. Salinger’s first New Yorker story to press (a story that turned into The Catcher in the Rye), Nordstrom told E. B. White that there were now a hundred thousand copies of Stuart Little in print. White invited his editor to a posh lunch to celebrate, saying, “You can eat 100,000 stalks of celery and I’ll swallow 100,000 olives. It will be the E. B. White–Ursula Nordstrom Book and Olive Luncheon.”79 Not exactly happily ever after, but close.

  Katharine White wrote her last “Children’s Shelf” in 1948. Her own children were grown. The Brooklin library would survive without her review copies. But she was exasperated, too. “No one who has examined five hundred and more juveniles, as I have this year,” a weary White wrote in 1948, “could say that the American child now occupies a submerged position in an adult world. There can surely be no childish taste, good, bad, or indifferent, that the eager publishers have not tried to satisfy.”80 In those years, you couldn’t walk a block without bumping into a pram. Did American letters, too, have to make way for babies? The paradise of childhood had crowded out adulthood.

  E. B. White published a second children’s book, Charlotte’s Web, in 1952. His wife said that he considered it “his only really completely satisfactory children’s book,” and it was adored, as far as I can tell, by everyone—everyone, that is, except Anne Carroll Moore, who complained that Fern’s character was “undeveloped.” Nordstrom, after hearing of Moore’s reservations and reading a rave by Eudora Welty in the Times, gleefully wrote to White, “Eudora Welty said the book was perfect for anyone over eight or under eighty, and that leaves Miss Moore out as she is a girl of eighty-two.”81

  Anne Carroll Moore died in her rooms at the Grosvenor on January 20, 1961, the day John F. Kennedy was inaugurated.82 “Much as she did for children’s books and their illustrators at the start of her career,” White wrote to Bechtel a few months later, “I can’t help feeling her influence was baleful on the whole. Am I wrong?”83

  Stuart Little has sold more than four million copies. In later editions, E. B. White made a tiny change. Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son is no longer born. He arrives.

  [CHAPTER 4]

  All About Erections

  It was in the living room. My father was reading the newspaper. I was reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Sherlock Holmes sat up with a whistle. “By Jove, Peterson!” said he, “this is treasure trove indeed. I suppose you know what you have got?”

  “A diamond, sir? A precious stone. It cuts into glass as though it were putty.”

  “It’s more than a precious stone. It is the precious stone.”

  “Not the Countess of Morcar’s blue carbuncle!” I ejaculated.

  I looked up from my book. “Hey, Dad.”

  “Hmm?”

  “What does ‘ejaculate’ mean?”

  He put down the newspaper. He sighed.

  I never did find out who stole the Countess’s blue carbuncle.

  At the start of the twenty-first century, kids with questions had another option: they could read a whole slew of books, with illustrations. “You already know a lot about your penis,” Karen Gravelle remarked in What’s Going on Down There? Answers to Questions Boys Find Hard to Ask. But she knew more.1 In Sex, Puberty, and All That Stuff: A Guide to Growing Up, Jacqui Bailey offered this: “Whether her hymen is holey or whole, a girl is always a virgin if she has not had sexual intercourse.”2 Lynda Madaras’s On Your Mark, Get Set, Grow! included a section called “All About Erections,” although the Bette Davis joke was likely lost on her readers; they were supposed to be in fourth grade.3

  “Pads are also called sanitary napkins,” Robie Harris explained in It’s Perfectly Normal: A Book About Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health, for ages ten and up, and then she had the good sense to add, “Sanitary means clean.” 4 Harris’s books, which include It’s So Amazing! A Book About Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families, for ages seven and up, were genuinely sweet, in a genre where, for all its good intentions, there was a fairly despicable tendency to be edgy, brash, and cool, as if what kids put out must be what they want from grown-ups. She had a section called “What’s Love?” and sensible, even existential answers (“Sometimes people just love each other”), along with a remarkably thoughtful discussion about love between men and men and between women and women. Harris’s books also boasted by far the best illustrations, honest and tender drawings by Michael Emberly.5 The worst? Robert Leighton’s cartoons in Gravelle’s books, which took their sensibility from Mad magazine—to wit, syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia as bug-eyed, slimy monsters, and, for a mascot (most of these books have a mascot), a tiny, naked, bald homunculus who walks around with an erection. In an illustration for a discussion titled “How Much Does a Girl Bleed? Does She Have to Wear a Bandage?” that homunculus guy is taking a nap on a sanitary pad.6

&n
bsp; Think of the genre as Kinsey for kids. The big hits in the 1970s were Where Did I Come From? The Facts of Life Without Any Nonsense and with Illustrations (1973) and What’s Happening to Me? The Answers to Some of the World’s Most Embarrassing Questions (1975), both written by Peter Mayle. If you put your mother and your father in a bathtub, Mayle suggested, you’d notice that they’re different. “You’ve probably noticed that already,” he granted, “but you notice it much more when you put them in the bath together.” “Vagina” rhymes with “Carolina,” Mayle explained, and an orgasm is like a sneeze.7 Ah-choo?

  While not the world’s most embarrassing question, here’s a good historical question: How did these books come to be? If the answers to life’s secrets are to be found in books, why these books? Couldn’t at least a few of life’s secrets be discovered on a foggy day spent at the neighborhood branch of your local public library, even in the Children’s Rooms started by Anne Carroll Moore, reading something else? What is love? Read a novel. Where did I come from? Philosophy, Religion. Dewey decimals 100–299. How are babies born? Librarians usually keep one or two well-illustrated anatomy textbooks near the reference desk. What does “ejaculate” mean? Dictionaries are made for this kind of thing. “E-jac-u-late, v. to eject semen.” “Semen” gets you to “spermatozoa,” which gets you to “ovum,” and before you know it, you know it all. I once saw two cats go at it beneath a blackberry bush in a vacant lot after dark; later, one of those cats gave birth to a litter of kittens in our cellar and, although at first I thought they were three blind mice, that, Webster’s New Collegiate, and Gray’s Anatomy pretty well covered it, which was good, because the Holmes chat had left me wondering, “Dr. Watson did what?”