Margaret Wise Brown by Leonard S. Marcus

Author:Leonard S. Marcus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

Having given up her office at 69 Bank Street, which had never amounted to much more than a desk, Margaret now worked at home. Not surprisingly, this arrangement proved problematic. Once, for instance, when an editorial assistant from Doubleday came by to review a set of page proofs with Margaret, Michael Strange suddenly burst into the room and in deeply theatrical tones announced, “Diana is coming!”54 The young publishing aide was suitably impressed by her brush with celebrity. Margaret, for her part, soon realized she would need a separate work place. Accordingly, with the help of her Bank Street friend Jessica Gamble, she found a quiet (and characteristically idiosyncratic) writing studio a mile or so from her apartment. Cobble Court, as the curious structure was already known, was an early nineteenth-century wooden farm cottage, incongruously left standing in a hidden courtyard behind the rowhouse block at York Avenue between 71st and 72nd streets.55

Evenings, Jessica used the two cramped upper-floor rooms she had rented there as a workshop where she made finely crafted children’s toys—wooden tugboats and the like. Margaret rented the equally compact ground floor rooms, which had waxed brick floors and, as her only heat source, an open hearth. As Margaret worked by day and Jessica by night, the two friends rarely saw each other, which on the whole was probably just as well. What Margaret most needed was a place in which to be alone from time to time. At Cobble Court, where even city street noise ceased to exist, she had found at least that much solitude. (After about two years, in late 1945, Jessica became engaged and made plans to move to Connecticut, and Margaret took over the whole of the little house.)

Her intentions notwithstanding, Margaret continued to write children’s books and to do so at an extraordinary rate. Many of her new manuscripts—Noisy book sequels, Horses (for which she devised the pen name Timothy Hay), and others—still displayed the direct influence of Lucy Mitchell’s ideas about patterned language and direct observation. At the same time, however, Michael Strange’s forceful personality was bound to effect Margaret’s work and her view of her work in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, much of the toweringly willful woman’s impact was to prove damaging. Henceforward, when Margaret experienced her periods of professional self-doubt, Michael stepped into the breach to confirm her sense of the smallness and insignificance—compared to the true poet’s art—of writing stories and poems for small children.

It was not that Michael Strange questioned Margaret’s talent—only the uses to which she put her abilities. Had not the older woman, through her poetry recitals, set out to bring the high traditions of literature and music to the people of a troubled world? Michael regarded herself as a sort of latter-day Joan of Arc. She had once recited from Saint Joan for Shaw himself, had written a play, Forever Young, about her, (“to me . . . the most sacredly enigmatic personage in all history”), and had even considered naming her daughter after the martyred saint.

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