The Mansion of Happiness (14 page)

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 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:

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:

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.

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

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

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
?”

Books about sex, usually offering advice about how to do it better, have been around for a long time. The most popular manual, even into the twentieth century, was
Aristotle’s Master-piece; Or, The Secrets of Generation
, which was first published in English in 1684. It caused a stir in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1744, when
Jonathan Edwards discovered that a dozen young men in his congregation had “read Aristotle,” a “nasty book, about womenkind.”
⁸
It went through twenty-six American editions between 1766 and 1831 alone.
⁹
It wasn’t exactly a masterpiece, and it certainly wasn’t written by Aristotle. No one knows who wrote it; it’s a hodgepodge. But it’s got both handy anatomy lessons (“The Clytoris … is the Seat of Venereal Pleasure”) and useful tips: “They that would be commended to their Wedlock actions, and be happy in the fruit of their Labour, must observe to Copulate at distance of time not too often, nor yet too seldom.”
¹⁰

Aristotle’s Master-piece
, though, wasn’t a kids’ book; it was written and published before kids’ books existed. Books explaining the facts of life to kids have been around only since the beginning of the twentieth century—the so-called
golden age of children’s literature—which is also when adolescence as a stage of life was invented. And, curiously, the books and the stage are tangled together, because adolescence, at least when it started, meant the time between when you learn about sex and when you do it.