The Mansion of Happiness (13 page)
Read The Mansion of Happiness Online
Authors: Jill Lepore
Katharine White had by now become something of a librarian herself. “Public libraries have more and more seemed to me a democratic necessity,” she wrote in 1942, “so most of my war efforts so far, instead of going into civilian defense proper, have been devoted to keeping alive the little library in this town.” Three years after she started her work, she reported to Moore that, what with all of her donations of the
New Yorker
’s review copies, her little library, now public and incorporated, and with vastly expanded hours, boasted “the best collection of children’s books in the country.” The only reason she was still continuing on the “Children’s Shelf,” she wrote, probably not entirely in jest, “is to have the books for the
Brooklin Library.”
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Her experience in Brooklin, however, only confirmed Katharine White’s cynicism about children’s literature. To her friend Louise Bechtel she wrote in 1941, “I think children’s rooms must have greatly increased the children’s reading and widened their horizons. Just to have the books assembled where they can be seen by the kids is all to the good. However, it occurs to me that there is a real danger in it and that is that these rooms
isolate young readers and make it less easy for them to explore the books in the library proper.” She laid much of the problem in the laps of librarians in big cities: “What public libraries need for kids, to my mind, are tough-minded, imaginative women, and men, too, as children’s librarians … but I’m almost willing to bet that such librarians are easier to find in the small town library than in the big city library where the
children’s specialist holds sway.”
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Katharine White believed, passionately, in public libraries, and in stocking them with books for children. What worried her were tiny spinsters sitting on books. Making a room for children is one thing. Guarding the door is entirely another. And then there’s the matter of setting traps for mice.
The Subtreasury of American Humor
was published in 1941. As for including humor from children’s books: “We gave it up,” the Whites confessed; they couldn’t find any. Ross’s battle with Luce raged on. E. B. White wrote
a parody of a
Life
circulation announcement. Ross wanted to publish it in the
Times
, asking a colleague, “Too strong? But what the hell?” The plan was axed. An
editor at
Fortune
alerted Ross to a
New Yorker
prank involving Luce’s wife’s underwear. “I don’t know any more about it than you do,” Ross wrote. “But I do know that there are a great many sallies of one kind or another between our two offices. It’s morbid.” By now, everybody was busy covering the war. “Honest to Christ,” Ross wrote, “I’m more dilapidated at the
moment than Yugoslavia.”
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Meanwhile, Katharine White kept up her editorial work and her column, where she disagreed, as ever, with the librarian she only ever addressed as “Miss Moore.” Moore adored Saint-Exupéry’s 1943
Little Prince;
White reported: “Every child I’ve ever pressed that one on was bored to death.” In the winter of 1943–44, the Whites moved back to New York, to a top-floor apartment looking out on West Eleventh
Street. Katharine began editing Nabokov. Her husband’s nerves were shot. He felt like he had “mice in the subconscious”: “The mouse of Thought infests my head, / He knows my cupboard and the crumb.” Then, miraculously, over eight weeks in late 1944 and early 1945, he finally finished the book he had been writing all his life. Saxton, White’s editor, had died in 1943. White sent the manuscript to
Ursula Nordstrom, the
director of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls, who was known as the Maxwell Perkins of children’s publishing; so great was her influence that she sometimes called herself Ursula Carroll Moore. (When the real Moore asked Nordstrom what could possibly qualify her to edit children’s books, Nordstrom shot back, “Well, I am a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing.”)
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Anne Carroll Moore had been waiting for
Stuart Little
for seven years. During all this time, she had claimed E. B. White, the most celebrated American essayist of the century, as
her
writer. She may have been retired, but even in her retirement, her powers had scarcely dimmed. She still showed up for meetings at the New York Public Library; she even still
ran
those meetings, much to the dismay of her successor,
Frances
Clarke Sayers, who tried switching meeting places, to no avail. “No matter where you held them,” Sayers remarked, “she was there.” (In an oral history conducted at UCLA in the 1970s, Sayers admitted that she found it all but impossible to stand up to Moore, a pitiless tyrant who made her life “an absolute hell”; reduced Sayers’s staff to tears by ripping up their lists of recommended books and substituting her own; and refused, utterly
refused,
to cede power: “She hung onto everything.”)
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Moore had come to think of recruiting E. B. White to the world of juvenilia as her final triumph—a victory over Tonstant Weader, a victory over Katharine White.
Stuart Little
was to be Anne Carroll Moore’s lasting legacy to children’s literature. In her
mind, it was
her
book. There was nothing for it: Nordstrom sent her a set of galley proofs.
“I never was so disappointed in a book in my life,” Moore announced.
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She demanded that Nordstrom visit her at her rooms at the Grosvenor Hotel, where she warned her that the book “musn’t be published.”
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She
sent the Whites a fourteen-page letter, predicting that the book would fail and that it would prove an embarrassment and begging White to reconsider its publication. Exactly what the letter said is hard, now, to know. The Whites threw it away—“in disgust,” Katharine reported. (Katharine White later insisted that Moore wrote not one letter but three: a relatively timid one to her husband and at least two more to her, each more vicious than the last.)
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Even in what looks to be a redacted form—only six pages of a dubious copy in Moore’s hand, rather than a typed carbon, survive—Moore’s criticisms were severe: the story was “out of hand”; Stuart was always “staggering out of scale.” Worse, White had blurred reality and fantasy—“the two worlds were
all mixed up”—and children wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. “She said something about its having been written by a sick mind,” E. B. White remembered. About one thing, everyone agreed: Moore made a threat and meant to carry it out. “I fear
Stuart Little
will be very difficult to place in libraries and schools all over the country,” she warned.
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“It is unnerving to be told you’re bad for children,” E. B. White allowed, “but I detected in Miss Moore’s letter an assumption that there are rules governing the writing of juvenile literature—rules as inflexible as the rules for lawn tennis. And this I was not sure of.” In the end, he shrugged it off. “Children can sail easily over the fence that separates reality from make-believe,” he figured.
“They go over it like little springboks. A fence that can throw a librarian is as nothing to a child.”
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White did not write back. His wife did. “K refused to show me her reply,” White told his brother, “but I suspect it set a new world’s record for poisoned courtesy.” It did and it didn’t. “I agree with you that schools won’t be likely to use ‘Stuart Little,’ ” Katharine wrote to Miss Moore, “but, to be very frank, just as you have been, I can’t imagine
libraries
not
stocking it.” And she couldn’t help asking, “Didn’t you think it even
funny
?”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.’ ”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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).
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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.
”
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