On a piece of paper
I write it
On my looking-glass
And on snow
I write it
—RUTH KRAUSS, I Write It (1970)
For Ruth Krauss, the harsh 1947–48 winter brought writer’s block. Through the middle of December, the temperature had been a bit warmer than usual, but on the 26th, two feet of snow blanketed Rowayton, the beginning of a three-month stretch when New England received twice as much snow as usual. By February, Krauss found it difficult to write, a situation for which she blamed William James, although she mixed him up with Henry: “It must have been Henry because according to my present figuring William is the fictionist (I know I should know which is who and all but the fact remains that except for this figuring out loud, I off hand do not).” William James (not the fiction-ist) disliked being interrupted when inspiration struck, anxious that he would lose his creative spark. She took his words to heart, and since then, Krauss explained, “I’ve spent a lot of time seizing on the impulse divine. I have stopped all and sundry—in fact, I stop everything still. I hide, I seek, I lure, I pretend I’m alone … to insulate myself, in order to carry out the creative urge because this James guy told me off at an early age.” As a result, “I have got so I really find I write best only when ‘inspired,’ in fact that [I] otherwise cannot write at all.” In the winter doldrums, sitting around waiting for inspiration was a poor strategy.1
To get started, Krauss borrowed an idea from a friend, possibly Nancy Goldsmith, who “planned to write three pages a day, in this way getting her ‘novel’ done.” From late February to late March, Krauss sat at her Remette typewriter nearly every day and wrote a few pages. If she kept typing, she reasoned, she would eventually come up with something she could publish— she could do “a lot of cutting and then a lot of building up the places where interesting subject matter comes in.” If that plan failed, then “maybe it can be of value just as a historical document.” The resulting 123-page manuscript is precisely that, providing a glimpse into Ruth and Dave’s daily lives, their relationship, and Krauss’s aspirations.2
Krauss titled the piece “Where Am I Going?,” reflecting her uncertainty about the direction her professional life was taking. She was not earning a living from writing children’s books, and Ursula Nordstrom had rejected Krauss’s most recent efforts. Hoping to publish an old novel manuscript, Krauss sent it off to be retyped. Thinking that she might publish her work in magazines, she composed an article about the writing of The Great Duffy. She worried that her life lacked focus.3
Movies provided her with welcome distraction. When reading a novel, Krauss tended to get bored by the details about a quarter of the way in, skip to the ending, and then put the book aside. But movies were her “own special form of almost (infantile) secret pleasure”: “I … like to just slump in the dark with my feet propped up on the back of the seat in front.” Krauss had recently overcome her fears and learned to drive, though she did so only during daylight hours and close to home. Either alone or with Phyllis Rowand, Krauss would drive to Stamford, do some shopping, and see a movie. She described Red Skelton’s Merton of the Movies as “very funny and also pathetic in parts,” but on a weekend trip to New York City, Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique; ou, Les Quatre Saisons, a symbolic film about rural post–World War II France, sent her straight to sleep.4
In New York, she and Dave had “a sublet of a sublet.” On winter Fridays, they would take the train into the city for the weekend. There, they would see publishers, go to parties, and visit friends such as Herman and Nina Schneider, left-leaning authors of many science books for children, and anthropologist Gitel Poznanski and painter Bob Steed, both of whom had traveled with Ruth on the Blackfeet expedition nine years earlier. Ruth could not stay awake through all these visits. After dinner one night with Dave, Poznanski, Steed, and psychologist Al Leighton, the author of The Navajo Door, which Ruth was reading, narcolepsy began to overtake her. Poznanski led Ruth to a bed in the next room, where she slept for an hour. The next night, at a party on Riverside Drive, Ruth fell asleep in a comfortable chair and dreamed of eating with chopsticks and then pulling paper toweling from a roll over her head. She found her dreams interesting but baffling: “If there is any significance anyone can find in these things, kindly communicate and the finder will be rewarded by I don’t know what.”5
Back in Rowayton, Ruth’s mind veered toward her fear of fire, which had resurfaced just after she and Dave moved to Connecticut. One afternoon, looking across the Five Mile River at the street where she and Dave had lived a few years earlier, Ruth saw Bob and Helen McNell’s house on fire and immediately phoned to tell them. During the winter of 1947–48, two more houses in the neighborhood caught fire, both “on nights of great snow around three thirty a.m.” The sirens woke Ruth, and looking out an upstairs window, she saw “the fires flaming up and coloring everything, and the sparks flying in the wind out over all the other houses and the weeds.” She and Dave dressed and went outside to join other neighbors. They could do little except “keep watch on the sparks” to see that the fire did not spread. These fires stirred memories of the Great Baltimore Fire of her youth, but Ruth tried to reassure herself that her anxieties were irrational: She did not worry about fire while staying in New York, and they had already had the Rowayton house’s furnace inspected and cleaned.6
But another night, Ruth woke up at 4:00 in the morning to a strange smell. She “thought immediately of fire, and specifically of the furnace.” Not wanting to wake Dave, who had come to bed only two hours earlier, she went to investigate. The smell, “pungent, … like strong urine, and slightly smoky,” led her to the basement door. When she opened it, the odor hit her “full blast,” but she saw no smoke. She pondered what to do before walking slowly down the stairs. Despite the absence of smoke, she turned off the furnace, and she subsequently determined that the smell seemed to be coming from the boiler. Nothing appeared amiss, but she woke Dave anyway, and the two of them “sniffed all around” their cellar. Dave concluded, “It must be a skunk,” but Ruth remained worried. Ruth went back to bed and Dave offered to “sit up and finish some work and ‘keep watch’” so that she could finish her night’s sleep.7
Ruth appreciated Dave’s thoughtfulness and willingness to assuage her fears. Because she sometimes got the idea that “people are about to attack me in the middle of the night,” Dave got in the habit of “locking the front door when he goes to bed” and was quite “conscientious about this.” However, he never thought to lock the house’s other doors. When fire became her main phobia, she began to feel that she would prefer to have the door unlocked, but she believed that she could not “simply turn around and claim on the same grounds—fear—that I want it open.” So she said nothing.8
Because they kept such different hours, Ruth and Dave slept in separate beds, both of which Dave designed and built, customizing them to suit their individual needs. Dave slept easily and never made his bed unless company were coming to visit. Ruth, however, could only sleep if she had first made her bed. In the mornings, she lacked the energy to make the bed properly, instead arranging the bedspread so it resembled a made- up bed. At the end of the same day, exhausted, she would, as she put it, “have to start all over again and make my bed, first kind of tossing up the mattress to see that it isn’t too harsh or lumpy. By the time I get through I am usually very much awake again.”9
One day each week, however, Ruth simply went upstairs and straight to sleep: the day Ethel Lerner cleaned the house and made the beds. Lerner began working for Dave and Ruth when they first moved to Connecticut, but even six years later, Lerner’s presence made Ruth feel self-conscious and even slightly guilty, especially if she were “sitting idly doing nothing like lying in the sun on the grass in summer, or even sitting thinking which to me is an essential.” To counter any impression of laziness, Ruth would “clatter away at the typewriter” or do some washing, a compulsion she recognized as “rather silly.” One source of Ruth’s anxiety was race: Lerner was black. Ruth consciously sought to treat the cleaning woman the same way she treated everyone else: “I always introduce her to my friends as Mrs. Lerner or, if I use her first name, I use theirs too. I always call myself by my first name when writing a note or phoning or anything, and the same with my husband. But she still calls me Mrs.—and I’m such a sissy that I’ve never got around to asking her not to.” In March 1948, an accusation leveled at a different black maid brought Ruth’s racial consciousness into sharper relief. One of Ruth’s white neighbors accused her maid of stealing two cups and two forks. Ruth believed that the white woman should have overlooked the theft because the accusation would make it difficult for the maid to find work and could damage race relations in the area: “If I personally were in a situation where I absolutely knew that a Negro had taken something from me, I wouldn’t mention it. Too much else is at stake in attempting to build up and keep good relations between peoples of all skin-colors, nationalities, religions, etc. Nothing is accomplished by accusation.”10
Another unfolding drama that winter starred their dog, Gonsul, named for a character (usually spelled gunsel) in the detective novels and true crime stories that Dave enjoyed. Gonsul enjoyed visiting his old friends, jogging across the iced-over Five Mile River to Darien, heedless of the fact that the ice was starting to melt. One day, after pacing up and down on a cake of ice, he made a jump for the next slab of ice and missed. He managed to scramble out of the icy waters and swam safely to shore but drew no lesson from his narrow escape and continued his perilous journeys. Worried that Gonsul might drown, Ruth told Dave. Dave replied, “He’s such a goof. He probably doesn’t know what’s going on but just saw a lot of dogs standing around there one day and he started to stand there too. He probably thinks they’re all standing in line to get samples of horsemeat.” Another day, a neighbor, Mr. Bates, phoned to report that Gonsul had fallen through the ice and was trying to reach the Darien side. Dave dashed to his car and drove over the bridge and around to the Darien side, where he found Gonsul playing his dog friends. Gonsul’s ill judgment amused Dave but worried Ruth and distracted her from writing.11
If slightly bemused by Ruth’s creative approach, Dave fully supported her experiment. One morning, Ruth mentioned that she was writing a book. He asked, “What is it about?” Ruth replied, “Oh, you just sit down and write.” Dave paused before asking, “No idea?” Ruth answered, “No. No idea.” Ruth and Dave both laughed.12
In another instance, when Ruth wondered aloud how she might end her narrative, Dave told her that Mark Twain, having got stuck at a certain point in Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), just “finished off his characters by something like the following: ‘Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fireworks and fell in the well and was drowned.’” Deciding that this “seemed a prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled,” Twain drowned several other characters. Dave used this plot device in a December 1948 Barnaby sequence: Reciting some allegedly magic words learned from phony exorcists, the curmudgeonly Mr. Merrie makes himself disappear rather than ridding his house of Gus the ghost. Mr. O’Malley then observes, “Mark Twain had a method for getting rid of characters he no longer had a use for. They all happened to fall in the well and drown.” O’Malley adds, “That exit of Mr. Merrie’s isn’t as plausible from a literary point of view, perhaps.”13
In late February 1948, Johnson and Krauss signed a petition supporting Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid. The preceding November, Johnson had joined five hundred others who signed “A Message of Greeting and Support” for Wallace when he arrived at LaGuardia Airport after two-week tour of Palestine. The document praised Wallace as the “true spokesman for the millions of liberals who are now uniting to demand a return to the program of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt.” On 23 December, Johnson, Mischa Richter, and other Connecticut progressives met with Wallace, urging him to run for president as an independent candidate. Wallace formally declared his candidacy six days later. He attracted strong support from Popular Front liberals, including many who wrote for children (Eve Merriam, Louis Slobodkin, and Lynd Ward) and current and former New Masses contributors (Richter, Adolf Dehn, William Gropper, Rockwell Kent). Wallace sought to create a “people’s peace [that] will usher in the century of the common man,” declaring, “I have fought and shall continue to fight programs which give guns to people when they want plows.” He also called for a fight “to end racial discrimination” and for “free labor unions, for jobs, and for homes in which we can decently live.”14
Though Krauss was less politically active, she too worked on behalf of social justice. In March 1948, she and Phyllis Rowand attended a Bank Street subcommittee conference in preparation the National Conference on Family Life to be held the following May. The conference sought to address some of the problems families were facing, among them housing, divorce, juvenile delinquency, education, health, medical care, recreation, home management, and social and economic welfare. Attendees included nine hundred delegates from twenty-nine professions and representing all forty-eight states, plus observers from thirty other countries.15
At a Bank Street Laboratory meeting earlier that winter, Krauss, Rowand, and several others had volunteered to analyze sexism in magazines for young people. Krauss offered to read through issues Boy’s Life and soon regretted having done so, fearing that the task would prevent her from finishing the book she was writing. However, she became both engrossed in the task and appalled by the sexism she discovered: The stories never showed men as involved in child rearing, always depicted boys at a distance from the family, and emphasized danger as manly. In contrast, the rare depictions of girls showed them as petty, foolish, or cruel. Krauss also found the magazine’s colonial politics distasteful—for example, its depictions of “simpler societies” as “savages”—and its glorification of capitalism. She concluded, “There needs to be an almost complete changing of ideal goals, goals that are strongly defined by our culture and in to which we are all born and in which brought up.” “Better general education for all” and mass media could help create change, she concluded, “because these are a great means of the perpetuation of traditional themes.”16
The coming of spring brought another stage adaptation of Barnaby, this time at Indiana’s Terre Haute Children’s Theatre. Adapted and directed by Robert and Lillian Masters, the production had Barnaby’s father running for mayor against the corrupt Boss Snagg. The play borrows dialogue from Johnson’s comic and focuses on characters rather than special effects or scenery. The Terre Haute Tribune predicted that the two-act adaptation “bids fair to be a favorite with Children’s Theatre producers all over the country.” Johnson had sold the rights to the Masterses for one dollar plus the promise of 50 percent of any profits from sales or performances of the play.17
Phyllis Rowand, 1946 or 1947. Image courtesy of Nina Landau Stagakis.
Radio also took another stab at Barnaby in 1948, with Lew Amster, Sidney Rumin, and Helen Mack in charge and veteran radio actor John Brown as Mr. O’Malley. Making his radio debut as Barnaby was John Brown’s son, Jared. The first episode of the half-hour program was performed and broadcast twice before a live Hollywood audience, once for the East Coast and once for the West Coast. Brown-Elliott Productions recorded the episode in hopes of finding a sponsor for the program, but although the project generated enough interest to record a second episode, no sponsor came forward, and the project fizzled.18
The color Sunday Barnaby strip, which had begun in 1946, came to an end on 30 May 1948. Drawn by Jack Morley and written by Johnson, the Sunday comic, which followed a narrative independent of the daily strips, disappeared because its distributor, PM, was foundering. Having lost more than four million dollars on his investment, the paper’s backer, Marshall Field III, sold PM to liberal San Francisco lawyer Bartley Crum. On 23 June, the former New Deal tabloid reemerged as the New York Star, with Walt Kelly as its new art director. Kelly also contributed editorial cartoons, and in October, his comic strip Pogo made its debut, running right next to Barnaby.19
The daily strip continued to register Johnson’s dissatisfaction with the country’s turn to the right and away from the concerns of working people. In late May 1948, Mrs. Baxter complains about rising prices, and O’Malley tells Barnaby, “Your Fairy Godfather will take over the management of the household in person! I’m moving in with you!” To economize, he proposes “buying the less expensive cuts of filet mignon” and slightly cheaper bottles of fine wine; firing Barnaby’s dog; and letting go of the butler, secretary, chef, chauffeur, footman, gardener, and caretaker (none of which the Baxters actually employed). O’Malley’s cost-cutting plans are ludicrous, but the narrative underscores the difficulties people face when prices rise faster than wages and alludes to Wallace’s proposal for price controls on the basic necessities. Most of Barnaby’s commentary is subtle, but Johnson occasionally was more direct. Just before proposing to run the household, O’Malley returns from a planned job as a research scientist, having “given up science” because it has become politicized. “Army and Navy investigators! State troopers! Loyalty oath administrators! City police! FBI men!,” he says. Finally, “when a visiting congressman saw my pinkish wings and subpoenaed me to Washington, I left science to its own resources.”20
Such comments reflect Johnson’s opposition to U.S. policy toward communism at home and abroad. In the same month that those strips appeared, Johnson, along with Aaron Copland, W. E. B. Du Bois, Howard Fast, E. Y. Harburg, Rockwell Kent, John Howard Lawson, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dalton Trumbo, and others, signed a statement praising Wallace’s open letter to Stalin, which called for an end to the Cold War, a “reduction of armaments” on both sides, “free movement” of citizens “within and between the two countries,” “unrestricted trade (except for goods related to war),” and the “free exchange of scientific information.” Wallace argued that “there is no difference” between the United States and the Soviet Union that could not “be settled by peaceful, hopeful negotiation.” Wallace’s proposal gained no traction with the Truman administration and met criticism from the press. For those on the left, the open letter was but a minor setback compared to what they would soon face.21